It’s not all Herman Melville and Moby Dick or Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, you know. Tons of other maritime material has been written and there is a website devoted to works by North American authors, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and plays, which number in the hundreds of volumes. How cool is that!

‘Literature of the sea’ or ‘maritime literature’ is defined as works in which oceans, large rivers, or expansive lakes are critical to the story. The Searchable Sea Literature website is an outcome of the The Maritime Studies Program of Williams College and Mystic Seaport and is maintained by students of this unique program. This list of works was initially derived from The Encyclopedia of American Literature of the Sea and the Great Lakes (Jill Gidmark, ed. Greenwood Press: 2000) and many can now be found in a Google Books collection.

Awesome!