In October 2011, a protester at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan wore a black T-shirt bearing the phrase "I would prefer not to" in white capital letters. The line, drawn from Herman Melville's 1853 novella "Bartleby, the Scrivener," became an unlikely rallying cry for Occupy Wall Street demonstrators. In Melville's story, Bartleby is a Wall Street copyist who responds to every demand with the same cryptic refusal: "I would prefer not to." The phrase captured something the protesters wanted to express: a quiet, dignified resistance to systemic pressure and conformity. The novella had been out of print for decades before its revival in the 1960s, and by 2011 it had become canonical in American literature courses. The image of Bartleby's refusal spreading across Zuccotti Park's makeshift library represented a convergence of high literary culture and grassroots political protest, turning a 19th-century story about passive resistance into a contemporary statement about corporate power and institutional coercion.