Herman Melville wrote a brilliantly and symbolically charged novella in 1797. It focuses on the experiences of a family member of Melville's who presided over the court-martial and execution of a sailor. Though written in 1891, Billy Budd, Foretopman or Billy Budd, Sailorwas first published posthumously in 1924. Coincidentally, the English composer Edward Benjamin Britten, aided by E. M. Forster's libretto, made Billy Budd into an opera in 1951.

A romantic novel by Charles Nordhoff describes what has become the archetypal story of mutiny. His 1932 novel, Mutiny on the Bounty, is based on the actual mutiny aboard the HMS Bounty in 1789 as narrated by Roger Byam.

In the 1970s, Wouk returned to World War II as a setting for a novel with a two-volume historical novel The Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978). The first novel tells of the heroic Lt. Henry...