"Young Goodman Brown," is a short story published in 1835 by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The character of Young Goodman Brown, an innocent, is tested by evil forces that are mysterious to him. He is nearly incapable of comprehending that the people he respects most might possess a capacity for evil. Melville was friends with Hawthorne and had the utmost respect and admiration for his work.

Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), considered by most critics to be his masterpiece, is, like Billy Budd, a tale of good and evil set against the stark setting of the sea. Captain Ahab, who obsessively seeks the white whale, Moby-Dick, is identified as a "monomaniac"; Claggart in Billy Budd is described as possessing a "monomania."

The Bounty Trilogy, a collection of three books by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, traces the historic mutiny aboard the H.MS. Bounty and its aftermath as experienced by the captain and crew. The first book in the trilogy, Mutiny on the Bounty (1932), is an account of the 1788 voyage of H.M.S. Bounty, during which Fletcher Christian committed mutiny against Captain Bligh. In Men Against the Sea (1934), Captain Bligh, along with the nineteen men who chose to remain loyal to him during the mutiny, travel 3,600 miles in an open boat that they had been set out in by the mutineers. Pitcairn's Island (1934) tells of how Christian, his fellow mutineers, and a few Tahitians end up on a forsaken island in the Pacific following the mutiny.

Melville's Redburn (1849) tells the story of an inexperienced yet proud young man who goes to sea and learns about the world through his difficulties with life at sea. While the innocent Redburn anticipates Billy Budd, the evil Jackson foretokens Claggart.