SOURCE: "Melville's Parable of the Walls," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXI, No. 4, Autumn, 1953, pp. 602-27.

Marx is an American educator and critic. In the following seminal essay, he examines the autobiographical aspect of "Bartleby, the Scrivener," focusing on the symbol of the walls and the depiction of the artist's situation in society

Dead,

25. Of a wall . . . : Unbroken, unrelieved by breaks or interruptions; absolutely uniform and continuous.

—New English Dictionary

In the spring of 1851, while still at work on Moby Dick, Herman Melville wrote his celebrated "dollars damn me" letter to Hawthorne:

In a week or so, I go to New York, to bury myself in a third-story room, and work and slave on my "Whale" while it is driving through the press. That is the only way I can finish it now—I am so pulled hither and thither by circumstances. The calm, the coolness, the silent...