Abstract

Ever since Jay Leyda theorized that Herman Melville’s friend Eli James Murdoch Fly was the real-life model for Bartleby in the 1940s, readers have accepted the theory as fact. Fly’s biography, which has never been told before, presents a different story. This article, which provides the fullest life of Fly to date, shows how different the real man was from the fictional character and how unlikely Leyda’s theory is in retrospect.

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