For an excellent, more expansive, up-to-date bibliography—as of 2014—see “Selected Bibliography” in The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, 233–43.

Brown, Gillian. Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Grandin, Greg. The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014.

Johnson, Barbara. “Melville’s Fist: The Execution of Billy Budd.” In The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, 79–109.

Levine, Robert S., ed. The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Martin, Robert K. Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

Miller, Perry. The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville. New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1956.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1993.

Otter, Samuel, and Geoffrey Sanborn, eds. Melville and Aesthetics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Parker, Hershel. Herman Melville: A Biography. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 and 2002.

Rogin, Michael Paul. Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville. New York: Knopf, 1983.

Sundquist, Eric J. “Melville, Delany, and New World Slavery.” In To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993, 135–221.

See also:

Hayford, Harrison, and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., eds. Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.

Hayford, Harrison, Alma A. MacDougall Reising, and G. Thomas Tanselle, eds. The Writings of Herman Melville, vol.