How long does it take to read Bartleby, the Scrivener?
Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville takes about 1 hour 14 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 1 hour 14 minutes
An evening's read
First published 1966. 67 pages, about 18,425 words.
3 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 2 hours 3 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 1 hour 14 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 46 minutes |
The page count is the median across 66 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
"Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" is a short story by Herman Melville. The story first appeared, anonymously, in Putnam's Magazine in two parts. The first part appeared in November 1853, with the conclusion published in December 1853. It was reprinted in Melville's The Piazza Tales in 1856 with minor textual alterations. The work is said to have been inspired, in part, by Melville's reading of Emerson, and some have pointed to specific parallels to Emerson's essay, "The Transcendentalist." The story has been adapted twice: once in 1970, starring Paul Scofield, and again in 2001, starring Crispin Glover.
Subjects: Fiction, Young men, Copyists, Psychology, Securities industry, Fiction, history and criticism
