Recommended reading: Bartleby The Scrivener/ Herman Melville (digitized version):

 Herman Melville’s story “Bartleby The Scrivener.”digitized and annotated by Slate.

They call it “a searing critique of American capitalism, a protest story, an existentialist paean to the necessity of going on in an absurd world.”

Bartleby is the character who coined the phrase, “I would prefer not to.”