* Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay (1976), a Pulitzer Prize-winning non-fiction book by William W. Warner about the Chesapeake Bay, blue crabs, and watermen.
* Chesapeake (1978), a novel by author James A. Michener.
*Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island (2018), by Earl Swift, a New York Times bestselling nonfiction book about the crabbing community of Chesapeake Bay.
* Diceys Song (1983) and the rest of Cynthia Voigts Tillerman series are set in Crisfield on the Chesapeake Bay.* John Barth wrote two novels featuring Chesapeake Bay
* Jacob Have I Loved (1980) by Katherine Paterson, winner of the 1981 Newbery Medal. This is a novel about the relationship between two sisters in a waterman family who grow up on an island in the Bay.
* Patriot Games (1987), in which protagonist Jack Ryan lives on the fictional Peregrine Cliffs overlooking the Chesapeake Bay, and  Without Remorse (1993), in which protagonist John Kelly (later known as John Clark when he goes to work for the CIA), lives on a boat and an island in the Bay, both by  Tom Clancy.
* Red Kayak (2004) by Priscilla Cummings portrays class conflict between waterman people and wealthy newcomers.
*Sabbatical: A Romance (1982) centered on a yacht race through the Bay, and The Tidewater Tales (1987) detailed a married couple telling stories to each other as they cruise the Bay, both novels by John Barth.
*The Oyster Wars of Chesapeake Bay (1997) by John Wennersten, on the Oyster Wars in the decades following the Civil War.