Broaddus, Dorothy C. Genteel Rhetoric: Writing High Culture in Nineteenth-Century Boston. Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1999. ISBN 1-57003-244-0.
William C. Dowling, Oliver Wendell Holmes in Paris: Medicine, Theology, and The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2006. ISBN 1-58465-579-8
Gibian, Peter. Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-511-01763-4.
Hoyt, Edwin Palmer. The Improper Bostonian: Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. New York: Morrow, 1979. ISBN 0-688-03429-2.
Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. ISBN 0-374-19963-9.
Weinstein, Michael A. The Imaginative Prose of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. ISBN 0-8262-1644-7.