Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas wrote the award-winning novel entitled "Bartleby & Co." that creates a catalogue of the many "bartlebys" in literature: writers who gave up writing, the "Literature of No", writers who sought denial. -wkp.

Bartleby & Co. - Enrique Vila-Matas:
from rvws: the narrator’s overwhelming isolation. abandonment and renunciation are the themes. first you abandon someone and then someone abandons you. meditation on presence and absence, on the why of writing yes why? and the metaphysics of refusal.
it does retell the old, old story with considerable elegance.

Complete Review's review: Bartleby & Co. is narrated by a humpbacked man, stuck in a bad job, with practically no friends or family. A quarter of a century earlier he wrote a novel (on the impossibility of love), but since then has been silenced, becoming a Bartleby-figure (as in Melville's novella). Now he sets out to become a 'tracker of Bartlebys', and begins this text: a diary in the form of footnotes to an invisible text, commentary and explication of what isn't there. The absent text doesn't figure strongly enough, making the footnotes appear little more than chapters, rather than actually adding to or responding to something (even -- or especially -- something that isn't there). Still, Vila-Matas offers a good survey of authors who abandon writing or are unable to continue, as well as some that take other approaches (such as the voluminous illegible scribblings of Robert Walser mmmm look into that).