I think it is somewhat weird that nobody put Twain in.
I could also see someone suggesting Hemingway, although I don't buy it.
Hart Crane at this point in time seems somewhat secondary, so that was surprising.
The Tracy Chapman thing seemed seriously like a troll, I could definitely agree to a black Homer, but then I guess it would be Langston Hughes or James Baldwin as my choices.
To suggest someone though who has the name recognition for American literature that Homer had for the Greeks, it would need to be Twain. You can't really have a great national writer that hardly anybody in the nation can name.
This falls into the great American author conversation and for that I would probably have to say Mark Twain or John Steinbeck. If you want to talk about lasting influence on the large literary world it is probably Edgar Allan Poe.
Tracey Chapman is an all time great, but beyond a few song probably doesn’t rise to the American Homer status. I don’t think I would put a songwriter forward for that but if you did it would have to be Dylan.
Dylan came to mind after reading the Chapman answer, not least because of his 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition"
Twain is a good choice, but he also works against the mythology of America. His whole thing was popping bubbles and making grounded stories that work against the backdrop of Americana.
Tracy Chapman is a pretty trolly answer, but I suspect the real answer might very well be a musician or filmmaker, not a writer.
Film (and television) seems studiously underrepresented given the presence of authors, playwrights, poets, and musicians. Musicals are also absent.
I'd also suggest that cultural impact plays a strong part in Homer's prominence. The American Homer would probably be older rather than more recent (at least by present reckoning).
Francis Ford Coppola / Mario Puzo, The Godfather; Michael Curtiz, Casablanca; Steven Speilberg; Orson Welles, Citizen Kane; Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Oklahoma!, South Pacific, The Sound of Music, etc., might make my list.
Stan Lee probably had more influence than Walt Disney in terms of how Americans see themselves and how people around the world sees us.
Walt Disney is overwhelmingly about older stories (Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty), and not anything I feel distinctly "American".
The most popular and timeless properties out of Disney (ex: Mickey Mouse) aren't really telling stories or setting cultural trends IMO. Meanwhile, Superman and Spiderman (Okay, I know Stan Lee only partially had influence on Spiderman...) are closer to what people see as distinctly "American".
>Stan Lee probably had more influence than Walt Disney in terms of how Americans see themselves and how people around the world sees us.
Seriously doubt it.
Both "how Americans see themselves and how people around the world sees them" was established way before both the MCU and before superhero comics became anything else than a preoccupation of the nerdy niche.
In the 60s, and 70s, and 80s, few fucks were given around the world for the Marvel comic universe (they still sold somewhat, just not that important culturally), and it was definitely not how people got to perceive the US: hollywood, the western, rock n' roll, all those were 100x more important. And Disney was way more important than Marvel at the time too.
What work of Disney (company, not the man per se...) is more influential on the modern American Psyche (today, in 2026) than Ironman, X-Men or Spiderman?
Moana? Sleeping Beauty? Mickey Mouse?
The only major "American identity" film I can think of was Princess and the Frog. Maybe Big Hero 6 (at least the San Francisco half).
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The others are correct in that Mark Twain is probably the real answer. But I'm thinking of a modern media (film, comic books, etc. etc).
Maybe Wicked and Wizard of Oz counts as two sides of American culture. A push and counter push.
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Sleeping Beauty? That's French. Beauty and the Beast? Also French.
Great Mouse Detective? British. Alice in Wonderland? British.
I think that’s correct. One way to look at it: when the Greek world expanded geographically, the new people tried to connect themselves with the Homeric stories (as did the Romans). Whose stories serve that function today? Disney.
Hollywood may only think that there are any Pacific Islanders today who want to be Auliʻi Cravalho, but every allied nation hopes to get their own Emmett Brown?
nah. the us certainly has a lot of inflated egos, but the mythology is not like that, consider abraham lincoln, Washington "cincinnatus of the west", paul bunyan, johnny appleseed, etc.
Although most popular knowledge about him revolves around his earlier acting career (Westerns, Dirty Harry), you'll notice a distinct change in many of his films once he started directing.
Today it might be but it wasn't always. I still remember curling up with a good book and I still do today. I know a lot of younger people might not even have a library card or go looking for a good novel to read.
Mostly agree, but I think the modern medium is film/TV, not just American. Also, apparently The Godfather book wasn't very good, but I've seen the movie so many times.
Actor and Director and Producer would be more than enough for everybody. Especially combined with several Oscar wins as director and producer, and even Oscar nominations as actor (on top of iconic roles).
But he has also been an OST composer for some films.
I think Tracy Chapman is not a troll choice, but a prediction. It is an interesting pick that highlights that highlights that all the picks are predictions, given the age of the country.
I think it is probably not a prediction that will end up right, because music is sort of limited by changing musical styles. But it is an interesting one.
Whitman was first in my mind, he invented free verse poetry after all, embodying the American wilderness in form before content.
If we are going to include musicians, Tracy Chapman indeed seems like a troll when have the significantly more impactful Bob Dylan, who dramatically altered the musical and political discourse at a key time in American history. Tracy Chapman... had a few good hits?
But this is about poetry, would Twain qualify as a poet?
My vote would go to Edgar Lee Masters because the spoon river anthology is one of the few poetry books I actually read, and it exemplifies a lot of the American spirit, IMVHO.
The vast majority of Cervantes's work was not in poetry, either. I think the idea is more "emblematic national storyteller" than poet in the narrow sense.
Tis surely Twain, but come on, he came ages after Homer and came with civilisation that was not there in America when Homer lived.
The whole idea for looking for America’s …Homer is just super bizarre. Modern (last 150-200 years) of America is not what it was thousands of years ago - it stands on the burial grounds of millions of indigenous people obliterated altogether with their cultural inheritance.
It is questionable even today if American authors bear more the heritage of European literature than anything else.
Homer was 2k years ago. Conquistadors made sure nothing would be left of anything that was 2k years ago. English and French, besides being smarter in the north, dis likewise.
So your American Homer’s legacy perhaps lies buried down in some unmarked indigenous grave.
> So your American Homer’s legacy perhaps lies buried down in some unmarked indigenous grave.
There are probably people similar to Homer in someways. However, the thing about Homer is that he influenced literature across most of Europe, North Africa, and much of the Middle East. I do not think any one culture in North America had the wide influence the Greeks did.
> Homer was 2k years ago.
Almost 3k years ago, and very likely to have just written down an existing oral tradition that could be much older. The historical events on which the story is based are about a half millennium earlier than Homer.
If you're going with songwriters grabbing epic snapshots of life, you're talking about songwriters in the class of Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, or Prince who wrote not just for themselves but others as well and were all pretty prolific in their output.
Twain seems the obvious choice, so yeah I’m disappointed they didn’t even mention him. Given that they invited submissions, I’d have loved to see a bigger variety, rather than two Frosts and two “no one”s. Those are both good choices, but not super interesting to read two of when other choices are left out.
> I think it is somewhat weird that nobody put Twain in
Edit: Lots of hate here. The question was why people didn't suggest Twain to be "America's Homer", and I answered the question: Twain is controversial, at least for some schools, and for someone such as CK, which should tell you something. Let's try not to shoot the messenger. If you didn't balk when you reached this line the first time you read the book, there might actually be something wrong with you.
"He [Mark Twain] also said 'There once was a man named [N-word] Jim,' so not everything he said was perfectly amazing" - Louis CK
"In the world of the book Huck Finn is not respected, although he comes close at times to it, contravening all the values of a society that should be considered corrupt by ours.
And in our world Huck Finn is not respectable and must be continually defended to keep from being totally thrown out of the literary society, because contravening the deep values of his corrupt society, he does have some of the surface mannerisms."
And you're going to quote a guy accused of sexual misconduct? CK will never be a Homer. But bringing that quote up from a piece of literature, not just something he said, is being ridiculous.
It's also amazingly ignorant. The entire point of Jim in Huck Finn is the extreme irony between superficiality and reality. Everybody in Huck Finn is horrible, including Huck himself, yet they mostly all paint themselves as the most honorable and just of people - and in most cases probably believe it.
The one exception is Jim who everybody just casually dismisses, yet he's the one truly good hearted and upstanding character in the entire book. It's a lesson about the difference between what people pretend to be like, and what they are really like. Which makes the critiques of the book, often focusing on pejoratives towards Jim, just so unbelievably ironic. It's the deterioration of thinking in society.
> The one exception is Jim who everybody just casually dismisses, yet he's the one truly good hearted and upstanding character in the entire book
Sure but you have to read the book first to know that, whereas the reader gets slapped in the face right away with the racial slur while reading the book for the first time, which is why some schools don't read Twain. This thread is about why people might not pick him to be the "America's Homer", I'm not trying to say anything more than that.
If you are not going to quote people accused of (or even known to be guilty of) sexual misconduct that covers a lot of authors and creative people in general.
"America's Homer" isn't someone you pick by committee. The fact that you have to debate means that this person does not exist. The American literary tradition is far too new for someone to have the kind of impact as others on the list. We are talking about people who, through their writing, created and evolved language itself.
No single author has defined how America speaks and writes the way Dante did for Italian or Cervantes for Spanish. And perhaps no one ever will.
> No single author has defined how America speaks and writes the way Dante did for Italian
No English language version of the Bible - prior to the King James Version - contained descriptions of Hell. At best, modern American conceptions/beliefs about Hell is fan-fiction based on Dante's Inferno.
Gehenna was well-known in the oral tradition of Jews and Muslims long before the 1600s. The whole "lake of fire" thing appears in the Book of Revelation, is very unambiguously referred to as such in the Greek text, and that's what most conceptions of hell come from. Dante's Inferno is literally frozen over at the bottom, which is not the standard Biblical version of Hell most people think of.
One aspect of Huckleberry Finn (the novel) that I think is relevant today is the spectacularly stupid zero-sum conflict between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons. It seems relevant to the US's politics and many international conflicts
Definitely Twain and it's not even close. Huckleberry Finn even has the episodic flavor of The Odyssey.
For books you have "The Innocents Abroad", "Roughing It", "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", "A Tramp Abroad", "The Prince and the Pauper", "Life on the Mississippi", "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", and "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court".
That's a hell of a lineup and includes a LOT of the flavor of the US as a young country.
I don't see how it's not him, Whitman (the timing of his work is a strong point in his favor, being so concerned with the civil war and that apparently-neveaending struggle in America's metaphorical soul), or maybe Melville though I think he's the weakest of those three. Most other plausible answers are too late in the country's history to take that particular title, for one thing. Irving and Poe are early enough but I don't think either's even close to the combo of clout, staying-power, influence, quality, and breadth of coverage of, specifically, Americanness that one would expect for this (and I like both of them!).
I would agree with other posters that if we allow the search to stretch into the 20th century, odds are we'd end up with a filmmaker or songwriter, but I think we've got our all-around best options already, and they're all (basically) 19th century.
I did. I read some of Twain in high school but didn't really "get it", in hindsight. Then as I grew older and began reading many of Twain's endless quotes it made me want to go read more of his works, and I'm glad I did.
I think high school readings are quite pointless in general, because most kids either aren't mentally developed enough, or aren't going to have the focus, to actually "get" what's being said - at least not beyond the point of cramming enough stuff down to be able to puke it back up on a test/report.
That was certainly the case for me and I think this is extremely common given there are plenty of people that think Huck Finn is a racist book, when the entire underlying message is a never-ending mockery of racism.
> because most kids either aren't mentally developed
I've gone back and read so many books I was supposed to have read in HS and college. I don't think at the time I had the life experience to fully grasp many of the message(s). It's one thing for a teacher or guide to explain in abstract the underlying messages, it's another to have dealt with them in your own life and see yourself in the characters [1].
[1] I always read like I'm one or more of the characters and not simply an observer.
I was raised where Sam Clemens was raised. People not only read the books. They tour his home. They tour the cave from Tom Sawyer. They attend the annual National Tom Sawyer days. They come from all over the world.
Plato (who came long after Homer) complained about "kids these days" not memorizing poetry (like the old farts did) and using that new fangled technology called "writing".
I love this thread and this question. I'm going to argue that it's Francis Ford Coppola. His Filmography in the 1970's I think captures America, the myth and the realities, for both their glamour and horror, better than anyone else before or after.
1972 -- The Godfather -- This encapsulates the American Dream better than anything else. It captures the arc of an immigrant story, of fitting in with America, and what it takes to succeed.
1974 -- The Conversation -- Chronicles where America is going as technology and politics changes and the impacts on our culture, through one man at the center of it.
1974 -- The Godfather Part II -- The story of an America and the image that it's built up, and the bloodshed necessary to both get there, and to cleanse its hands from the past.
1979 -- Apocalypse Now -- The sins of a nation that's ascended, and how the rest of the world must deal with America, and what it does to the psyche of those charged with empire building.
There's a body of work there that captures America in its totality more comprehensively than what anyone else has done. If I had to reduce this down to one choice, then it's simply The Godfather.
Diogenes of Sinope is maybe closer? He was sort of a living meme and there's a significant volume of apocryphal anecdotes of hijinks and pseudepigraphical writings, going on long after his death.
I always found it relevant that in Spanish-dubs they translate the name of Homer to "Homero" which would be basically how you would refer to the classic author rather than to some american layman. (as if e.g. in France I translated Homer as Homère instead of plainly Homer).
It has been argued that Sam Simons was the one that really honed in the characters of The Simpsons. Groening would throw out all kinds of weird ideas, like Marge was secretly a rabbit (thus the high hair), but Simons kept grounding the characters back into a form of reality.
The most technically correct answer is Walt Whitman.
Longfellow got dismissed by several people here for being too sentimental - but I would argue that sentimentality and saccharine character is distinctly part of America's mythos.
Washington Irving and Parson Weems would both also be good candidates. Early writers who had a penchant for mixing real history with tall tales.
The name I would throw out is John Ford. Ford basically invented the modern action movie, the mythology of the West, redefined masculinity, established the tropes of a hero, etc.
Poetry has fallen out of favor in culture at large, so I think it’s more logical to expand the question to authors more generally.
In that case, I think The Great Gatsby is the most logical equivalent to the Iliad and Odyssey. To me it conveys the essential elements of the American character: obsessed with reinvention via commerce, but inevitably tied to the past. It’s also probably been read by the majority of Americans, or at least the story is well-known. Can’t say the same for Twain, Melville, etc.
For more recent authors though, I think Don DeLillo is the best chronicler of mid-late century America.
That’s a common idea but I don’t think it holds up to scrutiny.
Putting poetry to music has a long history: see Homer, for example. And I don’t think there is much continuity between people that were writing poetry who later started writing rap. Different worlds, different audiences.
I do agree that some of the cultural desire for complex and creative language-play definitely is met in hip hop and rap, though.
"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." Ernest Hemingway
An odd question. America's "founding myths" are the Declaration of Independence and The Constitution.
These are the Holy Scriptures, and - like the Homeric ones - have multiple authors but lack the obscurity of ancient history to allow that latter fact to be subsumed into the story as a single, blind bard.
> the Declaration of Independence and The Constitution.
> These are the Holy Scriptures, and - like the Homeric ones - have multiple authors but lack the obscurity of ancient history to allow that latter fact to be subsumed into the story as a single, blind bard.
Nonetheless that hasn't stopped us from almost deifying the founding fathers. If not for the fact that many of them were slaveowners, they'd be deified already. Clearly, US society hasn't advanced beyond deification of its leaders, whether past or present.
Also, although they involve Gods, the Iliad and Odyssey are not religious texts in the sense of the Bible. They were epic legendary poems, not scriptures.
Our founding myths are actually Paul Bunyan and Blue. There's a whole cast of figures like Tom Thumb and more, structured around railway construction across America. Sadly, those myths have rapidly fallen from modern awareness, but they at one time were deeply embedded in the American identity, at least in a hokey tall-tales sort of way.
I like the alternatives suggested in this thread over what is being proposed in the article:
* Mark Twain
* Matt Groening
They are people who have captured the zeitgeist of their time and immortalized it in their art. They deliver their (countercultural) messages in an accessible and relatable way and have had a huge impact on our society.
I would add Shel Silverstein as my personal favorite.
I think that steinbeck is probably the correct answer. the iliad and the odyssey are not just "action epics", they are parable-ish in what they communicate to readers (or listeners) of their society. For example, it's not a coincidence that odysseus sleeps around the aegean sea while penelope chases suitors off at home.
Twain is a pretty good second choice, but Steinbeck has a pretty good lock on parables of American aspirations and its society both good and bad.
Steinbeck also wrote "the pearl" and of course "of mice and men"
Lots of excellent suggestions here. F. Scott Fitzgerald's missing so far - that's not necessarily who I'd choose but he belongs in the conversation. I don't think he's an especially interesting pick - Gatsby is cited as the Great American Novel as often as Moby Dick or Huck Finn - but he's a superlative writer who (like every high schooler in the country knows) explicitly and directly engaged with the meaning of America.
Homer, or the Homeric tradition, arose as rootless people displaced by drought and war in ~1,000 BC needed to sell the idea that entertaining stranger guests who had only stories from afar was worth doing, and that they shared common gods (versus the city-specific gods of earlier). This mind-set supported looser city-state alliances and cultures open to trading and ideas, who then outgrew the more xenophobic cities (like the Etruscans). So they semi-accidentally created a legitimizing belief system and thereby stumbled into founder roles.
America as the land of opportunity has flourished by acquiring more land and capturing value better, mainly by diminishing obligations to country and god and fellow humans. Yes, many writers bore witness to the frictions this involved with varying degrees of acuity or tragi-comedy, but no American writer wrote in a way that actually established this American mindset.
I think instead the mindset is perpetuated by each era building achievement heroes, stimulating belief in unbounded personal possibility. American literature is reduced to pointing out the vacuous consequences. As William Carlos-Williams wrote looking into his mirror in middle age, "I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so! [...] Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?"
If I had a vote, I'd nominate Willa Cather as the writer who portrayed that knowing moment of the powerless, non-achieving people enthralled with the beauty of nature as it was being destroyed. It's not what guides Americans prospectively, but it might best reflect history's perspective and our own retrospectives.
(I should add that I'm glad America has hoisted individuals and done so much to lift the global standards of living and care, even if it was more by greed and necessity than charity.)
Stephen King. Homer was not great literature at the time he his works were written. He was popular entertainment with a dose of folk religion. I’m not sure Homer existed. 1000 years from now people will say the same of SK.
I can write a poem in my head without ever writing it down on paper. I still wrote a poem, even if I just pass it along orally.
If I write a song for my girl, I'm not going to hand her a piece of paper with sheet music and lyrics, I'm going to perform it for her. I may write it down, or I may not.
Of course, composed is a more precise word, but everyone still knows what I mean if I replace it with write.
You can take note. Writing is a physical action, e.g. performing output.
Writing is an action. You can memorize, take a mental note, but you are not writing.
(Someone else mentioned Camōes, a portuguese who famously/allegedly saved his writings from a shipwreck by swimming with one arm and using the other to keep the book above water; your interpretation of "writing" is an insult)
Disagree, I think it's analogous to how we today use "fire" to describe the action of loosing an arrow or whatever the technical term is for a trebuchet, even though neither has gunpowder.
I don’t think so. The colloquial usage exists as grandparent commenter describes. I can be a “songwriter” without literally writing the lyrics to my song down.
I'm really not sure how anything else could be interpreted? I think this was actually very much to people's frustration even, as Homer was often misunderstood in their eyes, e.g. Plato often expresses this sentiment.
Probably sooner, IMO. Absent radical life extension, even 200 years from now there'll be nobody's left who remembers the time before deepfakes, and history will be brought into doubt.
Though bluntly we've always had nationalistic narratives contaminating what's "approved" in school, both with literature and history. Stephen King could be anything from mandatory to forbidden for any reason at the same time in different places, even on that kind of timescale. The USA may cease to exist as a singular coherent entity, and it may be two or more successor states in parallel who have a culture war with each other over if Stephen King was real or not.
Good question. No. Since the press was invented, our records have improved tremendously, partially because of the low cost of maintaing them. However, we still have detailed records from many eras, tracing back at least 3000 years. The egyptians had archeologists, let that sink in.
A side note: the article starts with "If England has Shakespeare, Spain has Cervantes, Italy has Dante, and Russia has Pushkin, then who do we have?" but does not mention China: usually Li Bai (李白) and Du Fu (杜甫) from Tang Dynasty (1300 years ago) are regarded the best poets in the history of China. Li Bai is nicknamed Immortal of Poetry (诗仙), while Du Fu is nicknamed the Saint of Poetry (诗圣). Most scholars like Du Fu better because his poems' use of all the connotative overtones, but most regular people like Li Bai better because his poems are easier to understand.
no talk about the only american writer with the guts to try to be like homer? the battlefield where the moon says i love you by frank stanford. obscure just like homer was in his time.
also, no mention in these comments about william faulkner?
though, i would bet money that "the american homer" will be somebody most readers have never heard of.
it's definitely not twain or hemingway, like everybody is saying. if you think it's twain, then it is faulkner, who was the first white writer to not write a one dimensional black character.
and no talk about toni morrison?? zora neale hurston??? do y'all read american literature?
I wouldn't actually vote for him but I don't think he should be forgotten and he should be mentioned in such a discussion. I would probably say Stein, solely for The Making of Americans.
Reducing these countries to a single name is probably the reason why we can guess this was written by an american; each country has at least a bunch of inspired authors per couple of generations. The country it is actively being bombed right now is the "modern" reincarnation of a nation that is roughly 10x older than the US. We all know who american Homer is, and this is the first year ever we whish we was the president. Friggin noobs.
The stories still passed down and translated into other languages two thousand years from now will be the answer. I think Sherman's memoirs could become something like the Iliad. They're surprisingly funny, engaging, and insightful, and Mark Twain (mentioned in this comment thread) had a hand in the memoirs IIRC.
Woody Guthrie, who gets a mention in the article, would get my vote.
I would argue that while poets and playwrights are a solid choice for ancient Greece, Music and Movies is the equivalent for America. Woody Guthrie is a solid choice because he traveled and collected folk music which was reflected in his own expressions.
As for movies I would want Jim Jarmusch to be Americas Homer, just because I like his movies a lot. But in reality I think the Coen Brothers are a more solid choice (aside from the fact that they have indeed adopted the Odyssey as an American folk story in Oh Brother Where Art Thou)
I would more consider him a Shakespeare of American Cinema rather then a Homer. Shakespeare was a prolific playwright (and a poet) who wrote plays about varied subjects and situations across the World of, some of his plays are of legendary status, and others not so great (same is true of Spielberg’s movies). Shakespeare’s plays (just like Spielberg) are also grounded in history and fiction rather then folk art and local legends and mythology. Also Spielberg is rather keen on adopting other people’s work to the big screen, which is a bit disqualifying* in this regard.
If you compare Jim Jarmusch who writes about epic road trips of regular people across the country, prisoners on the run from the law seeking the American dream, Vampires, Samurai hit-man in New York, then you start seeing how he reflects on American folk culture and mythology in his movies grounded in stories about American people (ditto Coen Brothers) much like Homer’s work on ancient Greek legends and myths grounded in stories about Greek society at the time.
What I am saying is that while Spielberg (just like Shakespeare) is a prolific director that has left us with many masterpieces (and other not-so-good pieces) he has not captured American legends, American mythology, nor American folk stories in ways Homer captured the Greek legends, mythology and folk stories. Both Jim Jarmusch and the Coen Brothers however have done so masterfully.
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*: I know Woody Guthrie also played covers and collected folk music and redemption songs, but that is a bit different then adopting an already successful and widely known book into another format (ditto Homer).
Spielberg has dealt with a few American tropes: UFO encounters, WW2 service men, slavery, monster sharks, road chases, cowboy archaeologists, tricksters, Abraham Lincoln, and hauntings.
I would pick F. Scott Fitzgerald. His book, The Great Gatsby, showed us that the 1920s in America was a highly divided society that was corrupted by materialism and more. His pessimism gives us a pretty good view into the past.
“Do we have a great poet who captures the American spirit, the American story, the American identity?”
No. There’s no singular “American identity” or story to capture. The U.S. has produced some amazing writers and storytellers who are, IMO, equal to the greats of other countries, but we have no collective identity that can be captured by a single person.
But if you put a gun to my head to identify one, I might argue for Steven Spielberg. If the U.S. has a Homer they’re not a poet or writer, they’re a filmmaker or TV producer.
The films he’s directed certainly capture big parts of the American mythologies, perhaps the largest of a single person.
Another option: Norman Lear. Maybe even more than Spielberg with All in the Family, Good Times, The Jeffersons, One Day at a Time… yeah. He definitely nailed a broad slice of American culture for a good chunk of time.
If you are a 250 year old nation built on "stolen land" (by the europeans, mind you), I would assume not many. But the US has been home to many great writers. This is just stupid.
I think this is a category error. Homer is the iconic writer of the Ancient Greek language and culture, not the modern nation of Greece. Cervantes and Dante are the iconic writers in the Spanish and Italian languages, respectively, not the nations of Spain or Italy. Italy wouldn't even exist as a nation until 500 years after Dante.
The American equivalent of Homer, Dante, or Cervantes is Shakespeare.
Homer and Virgil were historians at the end of the day. Whether what they reported as happening was true or not is as irrelevant as whether Alexander Hamilton threw away his shot at Aaron Burr or not. Their writings, just like Chernow’s, are steeped in legend.
Chernow’s work has excellently captured:
Alexander Hamilton
John D Rockefeller
JP Morgan
Ulysses (!) S. Grant
Etc.
As I type this out, perhaps the best comparison for Chernow is actually Plutarch? Either way, I haven’t seen anyone mention him and that would be an unfortunate oversight.
U guys will not agree i think, but for us, the non-usa, majority gonna choose Stephen king, he is your culture, the USA culture btw is 50s to 2000s and he capture all the feeling
We probably need more time to say for sure, but it might be David Chase. The Sopranos is partly an extended character study of someone who strives to fill American values as we imagine ourselves but also embodies American values as they actually exist.
I cannot answer that and I think it will be years before, so I went with "Nobody Yet".
Tracy Chapman is an interesting pick, but I think she could be in the future. But I am surprised Thoreau was not in the list, at least from what I was able to read.
> England has Shakespeare, Spain has Cervantes, Italy has Dante, and Russia has Pushkin
Author is conveniently avoiding mentioning France, which does not have a major figure weighing on the others that much. Hugo is probably the most homeric of the classic French litterature, but he’s much more recent and nowhere nearly as dominant as Shakespeare in England or Cervantes in Spain (which borders on the ridiculous in both countries imo).
It’s a better situation not to have an Homer but a constellation of good stuff.
English majors seem to have banded together to crown only the most inaccessible and politically charged authors as worthy of attention. If you like anyone else, you're just too inexperienced or partisan to appreciate real literature. To hell with them.
The answer is Brandon Sanderson who is freely sharing his knowledge of how to write with the world. His teachings will touch more in the coming years than any stodgy 1920s writer ever cared to.
Which of the proposed answers in the linked article would you characterize as one or both of "inaccessible" and "politically charged"?
I think a couple are bad answers (Wilder? She's fine-ish, but America's Homer? Very, very, no) but can't figure out which ones might be striking you that way.
>>English majors seem to have banded together to crown only the most inaccessible and politically charged authors as worthy of attention
Tell me you're an Engineer/don't hang out with actual "English Majors" (I'm 41, I don't spend much time on The Quad these days) without telling me as much.
Lit nerds love nothing more than fighting over the Canon (which, is the point of the article). To hell with banishing whole groups because you're lazy and stereotyping (this sentence is ironic considering the start of the paragraph...)
Brandon Sanderson writes forgettable stories for pubescent children. His characters fill very specific plot roles and those plots don't really deviate in any interesting way. Saying he's Temu Terry Pratchett is doing a giant disservice to Pratchett.
Do you consider Frost inaccessible (or for that matter politically-charged)? I think every kid who grows up in New England reads him in elementary or middle school.
Homer is America's Homer. Homer is western civilization's Homer. Thousands of Americans have composed epics, but Homer is still the one with primacy. All succeeding epics defer to Homer, including the American ones.
Homer's stories are essentially mythological. 'Huckleberry Finn,' on the other hand, feels more like satire than myth. But 'Moby-Dick' carries that mythic quality. Ahab is a whaling captain, but at the same time, he appears as a tragic king confronting a world he cannot understand or accept. And Moby Dick seems to symbolize both an animal and nature itself.
Homer's epics feature human heroes who converse with divine beings. 'Moby-Dick' doesn't have that, but the overall atmosphere is mystical enough that I see it that way.
The Pequod is both a commercial vessel and a representation of the American national system. The sea is described as a geographical space, yet also as a universe beyond human comprehension.
There's no question that Mark Twain is a great author representing America. But if I had to choose one mythic work in American literature that corresponds to Homer, I would choose Herman Melville's 'Moby-Dick'.
Ah good points, in fact some points that deepen our understanding of Homer.
Main one you might have thought about is that the gods of Homer are also deeply flawed (habitually full of hubris themselves!).. I think it was Nietzsche who said that the gods wish they could be Achilles or Odysseus?
Now.. who are the conflicting partys in every Homeric arc? Often at least 2 gods..
(I have not thought about Moby Dick this way either, or the "Greek system" in those days.. palace economy?
In The World of Odysseus he noted that most distribution was internal:[5]
All the production work, the seeding and harvesting and milling and weaving, even the hunting and raiding, though carried on by individuals, was performed on behalf of the household as a whole ... and from the centre they were redistributed ...
)
I think one of the beautiful things about America is its formation as a country contains so many nations, and in a way America’s cultural history is inseparable from those nations it contains (newly formed) extensions of. America is a young country made from the offshoots of old countries. So in some ways, I think America’s Homer can simply be Homer, just as America’s Shakespeare can be - if an American chooses - Shakespeare. That’s a beautiful idea for a nation.
To think about the question less evasively, for me, it depends on which aspect of Homer is primary. I’m restricting myself here to widely read texts which I think have had vast impact on national character.
If it’s the idea of suffering, frontier, and the impossible but attempted journey, I find it hard to look beyond Melville. Not just for Moby Dick, but I would argue Bartleby, the Scrivener is an incredibly prophetic work about how regular people would come to experience the deep strangeness of modern American life.
If it’s a question of language - of how we write and speak to each other - so much of American language rests on Hemingway. This answer is unavoidable for me. In American communication, so much value is placed on clarity, and brevity, and the idea of “cool”.
If it’s Homer as an epic, sweet, sad, narratively-loose, arguably-multi-authored, and kind-of-orally-told document of American life, widely shared: Why not Homer Simpson? The Simpsons is art at its best, and has clear export and staying power for audiences.
I think the real answer is probably that it’s too early to say. Bob Dylan will probably be on this list in a century - but I think the ways his work is prophetic of future art and the broader future world have not quite formed into reality yet.
Scott Fitzgerald might be there if America’s 21st century experience is so defined by striving, (self) deception, and startlingly violent tragedy as its 20th century was.
Similarly, if America stays as strange and psychedelic and new as it has been in the 20th century, a case could be made for H P Lovecraft.
While I don’t personally enjoy Lovecraft’s prose, his ideas are increasingly prescient. In the 20th century, Americans walked on the moon. In the 21st, Americans have invented - in the consumer LLM - a thing for which the most tractable analogy is Cthulu, with its many-faces of a single entity, its cultists, and its nondeterministic and unknowable - or incomprehensible - non-human motivation or end-point, which can only really be described as a desire for its own momentum.
Some good takes so I hate to be glib but no one because 1. the US was founded long after the invention of writing and even the printing press plus 2. bronze age morality and worldview are completely alien to us in ways that no subculture in the US is.
The article references "England has Shakespeare (1600s), Spain has Certantes (1600s) Russia has Pushkin (1800s)" whom I assume are intended as their nations' versions.
You going to stand on your statement with that as a reference? We're closer to Pushkin than Pushkin was to Homer.
For me, it's Steinbeck. I think his novels capture the uniqueness American spirit, good and bad. Generosity and stubbornness, a contrast of high ideals and actions that don't always live up to them, but sometimes surpass them. They are practical stories about real people we've probably met but don't fully understand.
Cannery Row, To a God Unknown and Tortilla Flat are easy to read examples of this if you don't want to commit to East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath. Travels with Charley is also a log of America in the 60s, even if you take it as a novel.
Since nobody seems to want to do it, I'll throw Kurk Vonnegut out. We're a satire of a nation and he's our greatest satirist (sorry Sam Clemmens, you're too earnest, even when telling a joke.)
Homer is a voice from antiquity. How many American stories and storytellers will be remembered and widely known in a millennium or 3? It will take a long time before we have a definitive answer.
Such a person may not have been born yet. Maybe we need to go back to the stone age and rebuild civilization before a bard as reputable as Homer appears in what we currently call America.
George Gershwin for his musicals. George Lucas and/or Spielberg for Indiana Jones. I considered loughead for publishing Paul Bunyan or Jack London for the likes of Call of the Wild. Poe is a strong contender as is Dashiell Hammett.
Okay, here's who popped into my head right away: Rod Serling. I know, most people meet Homer on the page and think of him as a poet. But for the people who first heard him, he was just a storyteller. The poems, with their gods and monsters and outrageous adventures, really just let him talk about the stuff everyone knew—human screw-ups, disappointments, all of it.
Serling did the same thing. The Twilight Zone wasn't actually about space aliens or killer ventriloquist dummies. That stuff was just window dressing. What he really wanted to tackle was prejudice, fear, the way we all go along with the group, greed, war, power—real-world ugliness, just in disguise. The science fiction wasn't the point. It let him slip tough questions past people's defenses.
And the timing mattered. Think about when Serling wrote. America right after World War II, everyone anxious about the Cold War, McCarthy running witch hunts, the civil rights fight heating up, and nobody sure what the new nuclear world would bring. Each week, millions of people sat down for the same shared story. If Homer gave the Greeks their way of thinking about their world, Serling did something like that for Americans finding their way through the 20th century.
I'd throw out another name, too. Vin Scully. Sounds weird until you remember that Homer was an oral storyteller first, long before school teachers made him homework.
What did Scully do for sixty-plus years? Storytelling. A Dodgers game wasn't just a game if he was on the mic. He wove this endless tapestry of history, jokes, heartbreaks, odd facts about players you'd never heard of, and by the third out you cared about all of them. He gave baseball this sense of belonging, like it was its own little world, with memories that mattered. And what is more American than baseball?
Honestly, that's the most Homer-like thing. Before Homer was something you read, he was a voice everyone leaned in to hear together. Scully did that, too—families, whole neighborhoods, strangers all listening to the same man at the same time, sharing a story as it happened.
We don't do that much anymore—share the same story, at the same time. We're pros at binging our own shows in private. Scully deserves a spot in this conversation, not just because baseball is some American Iliad, but because he did what Homer did first: he spun day-to-day events into a story everyone remembered together.
I think it is somewhat weird that nobody put Twain in.
I could also see someone suggesting Hemingway, although I don't buy it.
Hart Crane at this point in time seems somewhat secondary, so that was surprising.
The Tracy Chapman thing seemed seriously like a troll, I could definitely agree to a black Homer, but then I guess it would be Langston Hughes or James Baldwin as my choices.
To suggest someone though who has the name recognition for American literature that Homer had for the Greeks, it would need to be Twain. You can't really have a great national writer that hardly anybody in the nation can name.
This falls into the great American author conversation and for that I would probably have to say Mark Twain or John Steinbeck. If you want to talk about lasting influence on the large literary world it is probably Edgar Allan Poe.
Tracey Chapman is an all time great, but beyond a few song probably doesn’t rise to the American Homer status. I don’t think I would put a songwriter forward for that but if you did it would have to be Dylan.
Dylan came to mind after reading the Chapman answer, not least because of his 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition"
Twain is a good choice, but he also works against the mythology of America. His whole thing was popping bubbles and making grounded stories that work against the backdrop of Americana.
Tracy Chapman is a pretty trolly answer, but I suspect the real answer might very well be a musician or filmmaker, not a writer.
Film (and television) seems studiously underrepresented given the presence of authors, playwrights, poets, and musicians. Musicals are also absent.
I'd also suggest that cultural impact plays a strong part in Homer's prominence. The American Homer would probably be older rather than more recent (at least by present reckoning).
Francis Ford Coppola / Mario Puzo, The Godfather; Michael Curtiz, Casablanca; Steven Speilberg; Orson Welles, Citizen Kane; Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Oklahoma!, South Pacific, The Sound of Music, etc., might make my list.
> the real answer might very well be a musician or filmmaker, not a writer.
Walter Disney, obviously.
Well, it will probably take at least another century for the fact to hit.
Stan Lee probably had more influence than Walt Disney in terms of how Americans see themselves and how people around the world sees us.
Walt Disney is overwhelmingly about older stories (Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty), and not anything I feel distinctly "American".
The most popular and timeless properties out of Disney (ex: Mickey Mouse) aren't really telling stories or setting cultural trends IMO. Meanwhile, Superman and Spiderman (Okay, I know Stan Lee only partially had influence on Spiderman...) are closer to what people see as distinctly "American".
Who would win in a fight between Stan Lee, Jim Henson, and Walt Disney?
Maybe Epic Rap Battles of History has the answer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXBJIZ1NXFU
>Stan Lee probably had more influence than Walt Disney in terms of how Americans see themselves and how people around the world sees us.
Seriously doubt it.
Both "how Americans see themselves and how people around the world sees them" was established way before both the MCU and before superhero comics became anything else than a preoccupation of the nerdy niche.
In the 60s, and 70s, and 80s, few fucks were given around the world for the Marvel comic universe (they still sold somewhat, just not that important culturally), and it was definitely not how people got to perceive the US: hollywood, the western, rock n' roll, all those were 100x more important. And Disney was way more important than Marvel at the time too.
What work of Disney (company, not the man per se...) is more influential on the modern American Psyche (today, in 2026) than Ironman, X-Men or Spiderman?
Moana? Sleeping Beauty? Mickey Mouse?
The only major "American identity" film I can think of was Princess and the Frog. Maybe Big Hero 6 (at least the San Francisco half).
-----------
The others are correct in that Mark Twain is probably the real answer. But I'm thinking of a modern media (film, comic books, etc. etc).
Maybe Wicked and Wizard of Oz counts as two sides of American culture. A push and counter push.
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Sleeping Beauty? That's French. Beauty and the Beast? Also French.
Great Mouse Detective? British. Alice in Wonderland? British.
Pinocchio? Italian.
"Meanwhile, Superman and Spiderman (Okay, I know Stan Lee only partially had influence on Spiderman...) "
it's not like he had anything to do with superman
You mean Jack Kirby right? LoL
Its not like Walt Disney personally wrote or drew all his stuff either. Stan Lee was closer to actually making the story than Walt Disney.
But yeah, Jack Kirby would be closer than the other two.
cough Ub Iwerks
I think that’s correct. One way to look at it: when the Greek world expanded geographically, the new people tried to connect themselves with the Homeric stories (as did the Romans). Whose stories serve that function today? Disney.
Really? Advertising/Marketing aside, "What's up doc?" would seem to have a much bigger share of the zeitgeist, even today, than the Mouse.
Hollywood may only think that there are any Pacific Islanders today who want to be Auliʻi Cravalho, but every allied nation hopes to get their own Emmett Brown?
Are you sure that works against the mythology of America?
Questioning authority and mythology is very American.
lmfao
Well, so authority figures tells us :)
popping inflated egos is the mythology of America
A single word could be removed from that sentence and it would immediately find widespread agreement
nah. the us certainly has a lot of inflated egos, but the mythology is not like that, consider abraham lincoln, Washington "cincinnatus of the west", paul bunyan, johnny appleseed, etc.
yeah, the first one :)
Kubrick
British.
He’s from NYC
Hmm
Wheres the evidence that Homer work ed for the mythology of Dark Age Greece?
If you say its his popularity..
(I would cite the Cyclics as counter evidence)
For filmmaker: itd have to be someone whom you can imagine (unironically) reconstructing Adams or other actual American heroes
So..
Tom Hanks
I'd actually put one in for Clint Eastwood.
Although most popular knowledge about him revolves around his earlier acting career (Westerns, Dirty Harry), you'll notice a distinct change in many of his films once he started directing.
* Play Misty for Me
* Breezy
* Unforgiven
* A Perfect World
* The Bridges of Madison County
* Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
* Mystic River
* Million Dollar Baby
* Changeling
* Gran Torino
* American Sniper
* Sully
* The Mule
The American medium is film/TV. The Godfather is the great American novel. A story about immigrants moving to America and starting a family business.
Today it might be but it wasn't always. I still remember curling up with a good book and I still do today. I know a lot of younger people might not even have a library card or go looking for a good novel to read.
Mostly agree, but I think the modern medium is film/TV, not just American. Also, apparently The Godfather book wasn't very good, but I've seen the movie so many times.
Clint Eastwood didn't write any of those. He's an actor, director and producer of other people's work.
Actor and Director and Producer would be more than enough for everybody. Especially combined with several Oscar wins as director and producer, and even Oscar nominations as actor (on top of iconic roles).
But he has also been an OST composer for some films.
Not to forget
Letters from Iwo Jima
Flags of our Fathers.
He certainly took me by surprise by the depth of his offerings, given that I used to know him as blondie with no name and for dirty harry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_with_No_Name
> Tom Hanks
Recency bias? Why not Jimmy Stewart? Gregory Peck? Humphrey Bogart? Paul Newman, Robert Redford?
Not really. He was executive producer of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Adams_(miniseries)
And will be playing and producing Dodd.
https://variety.com/2019/film/news/joe-wright-in-the-garden-...
Theme of his oevre is not-so-immortal American heroes and heroism through and through
Except for Redford, the others don't have their own voice
Edit: but Tom Hanks is really only barely getting by from Hollywood getting less repressive over time
As far as I know, it's contested whether Homer even existed as an individual at all. "Homer" might be a collective title for various unknown authors.
I think Tracy Chapman is not a troll choice, but a prediction. It is an interesting pick that highlights that highlights that all the picks are predictions, given the age of the country.
I think it is probably not a prediction that will end up right, because music is sort of limited by changing musical styles. But it is an interesting one.
> I could also see someone suggesting Hemingway, although I don't buy it.
Some of his works are already in the public domain in the US and can be found on Project Gutenberg, so you may not have to buy.
Twain or Steinbeck. I'd say anyone else is folly
Even Bob Dylan?
Especially Bob Dylan. Nasal whining isn't historical America.
I haven’t heard Homer’s voice. There’s more to being a songwriter than vocal talent, though.
Whitman was first in my mind, he invented free verse poetry after all, embodying the American wilderness in form before content.
If we are going to include musicians, Tracy Chapman indeed seems like a troll when have the significantly more impactful Bob Dylan, who dramatically altered the musical and political discourse at a key time in American history. Tracy Chapman... had a few good hits?
But this is about poetry, would Twain qualify as a poet?
My vote would go to Edgar Lee Masters because the spoon river anthology is one of the few poetry books I actually read, and it exemplifies a lot of the American spirit, IMVHO.
It's at least arguably about storytelling. You don't sit around the fire talking in verse for your entertainment.
For instance, one of Homer's works is in the news due to a film being made of it.
I suppose that suggests the Coen brothers.
Well, yes, the Coen brothers did do the best version of the Odyssey for screen after all.
The vast majority of Cervantes's work was not in poetry, either. I think the idea is more "emblematic national storyteller" than poet in the narrow sense.
It’s obviously Twain.
Tis surely Twain, but come on, he came ages after Homer and came with civilisation that was not there in America when Homer lived.
The whole idea for looking for America’s …Homer is just super bizarre. Modern (last 150-200 years) of America is not what it was thousands of years ago - it stands on the burial grounds of millions of indigenous people obliterated altogether with their cultural inheritance.
It is questionable even today if American authors bear more the heritage of European literature than anything else.
Homer was 2k years ago. Conquistadors made sure nothing would be left of anything that was 2k years ago. English and French, besides being smarter in the north, dis likewise.
So your American Homer’s legacy perhaps lies buried down in some unmarked indigenous grave.
> So your American Homer’s legacy perhaps lies buried down in some unmarked indigenous grave.
There are probably people similar to Homer in someways. However, the thing about Homer is that he influenced literature across most of Europe, North Africa, and much of the Middle East. I do not think any one culture in North America had the wide influence the Greeks did.
> Homer was 2k years ago.
Almost 3k years ago, and very likely to have just written down an existing oral tradition that could be much older. The historical events on which the story is based are about a half millennium earlier than Homer.
I had the same thought, but it appears they are explicitly asking about poets, not just literary figures and authors.
Poe seems like an obvious candidate no one listed.
If you're going with songwriters grabbing epic snapshots of life, you're talking about songwriters in the class of Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, or Prince who wrote not just for themselves but others as well and were all pretty prolific in their output.
Poe
Twain
Twain seems the obvious choice, so yeah I’m disappointed they didn’t even mention him. Given that they invited submissions, I’d have loved to see a bigger variety, rather than two Frosts and two “no one”s. Those are both good choices, but not super interesting to read two of when other choices are left out.
> I think it is somewhat weird that nobody put Twain in
Edit: Lots of hate here. The question was why people didn't suggest Twain to be "America's Homer", and I answered the question: Twain is controversial, at least for some schools, and for someone such as CK, which should tell you something. Let's try not to shoot the messenger. If you didn't balk when you reached this line the first time you read the book, there might actually be something wrong with you.
"He [Mark Twain] also said 'There once was a man named [N-word] Jim,' so not everything he said was perfectly amazing" - Louis CK
https://medium.com/luminasticity/huck-finn-one-of-the-greate...
"In the world of the book Huck Finn is not respected, although he comes close at times to it, contravening all the values of a society that should be considered corrupt by ours.
And in our world Huck Finn is not respectable and must be continually defended to keep from being totally thrown out of the literary society, because contravening the deep values of his corrupt society, he does have some of the surface mannerisms."
And you're going to quote a guy accused of sexual misconduct? CK will never be a Homer. But bringing that quote up from a piece of literature, not just something he said, is being ridiculous.
It's also amazingly ignorant. The entire point of Jim in Huck Finn is the extreme irony between superficiality and reality. Everybody in Huck Finn is horrible, including Huck himself, yet they mostly all paint themselves as the most honorable and just of people - and in most cases probably believe it.
The one exception is Jim who everybody just casually dismisses, yet he's the one truly good hearted and upstanding character in the entire book. It's a lesson about the difference between what people pretend to be like, and what they are really like. Which makes the critiques of the book, often focusing on pejoratives towards Jim, just so unbelievably ironic. It's the deterioration of thinking in society.
> The one exception is Jim who everybody just casually dismisses, yet he's the one truly good hearted and upstanding character in the entire book
Sure but you have to read the book first to know that, whereas the reader gets slapped in the face right away with the racial slur while reading the book for the first time, which is why some schools don't read Twain. This thread is about why people might not pick him to be the "America's Homer", I'm not trying to say anything more than that.
If you are not going to quote people accused of (or even known to be guilty of) sexual misconduct that covers a lot of authors and creative people in general.
"America's Homer" isn't someone you pick by committee. The fact that you have to debate means that this person does not exist. The American literary tradition is far too new for someone to have the kind of impact as others on the list. We are talking about people who, through their writing, created and evolved language itself.
No single author has defined how America speaks and writes the way Dante did for Italian or Cervantes for Spanish. And perhaps no one ever will.
> No single author has defined how America speaks and writes the way Dante did for Italian
No English language version of the Bible - prior to the King James Version - contained descriptions of Hell. At best, modern American conceptions/beliefs about Hell is fan-fiction based on Dante's Inferno.
Gehenna was well-known in the oral tradition of Jews and Muslims long before the 1600s. The whole "lake of fire" thing appears in the Book of Revelation, is very unambiguously referred to as such in the Greek text, and that's what most conceptions of hell come from. Dante's Inferno is literally frozen over at the bottom, which is not the standard Biblical version of Hell most people think of.
Sheol got turned into Hades, then Christianity mashed it together with Gehenna to create "Hell".
Or Shakespeare for English
Neither TFA or this thread are legally binding, there are no consequences other than some fun and maybe finding something new to read.
I found paxys' comment fun, so you're right!
Mark Twain is America's Homer
One aspect of Huckleberry Finn (the novel) that I think is relevant today is the spectacularly stupid zero-sum conflict between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons. It seems relevant to the US's politics and many international conflicts
Definitely Twain and it's not even close. Huckleberry Finn even has the episodic flavor of The Odyssey.
For books you have "The Innocents Abroad", "Roughing It", "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", "A Tramp Abroad", "The Prince and the Pauper", "Life on the Mississippi", "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", and "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court".
That's a hell of a lineup and includes a LOT of the flavor of the US as a young country.
I don't see how it's not him, Whitman (the timing of his work is a strong point in his favor, being so concerned with the civil war and that apparently-neveaending struggle in America's metaphorical soul), or maybe Melville though I think he's the weakest of those three. Most other plausible answers are too late in the country's history to take that particular title, for one thing. Irving and Poe are early enough but I don't think either's even close to the combo of clout, staying-power, influence, quality, and breadth of coverage of, specifically, Americanness that one would expect for this (and I like both of them!).
I would agree with other posters that if we allow the search to stretch into the 20th century, odds are we'd end up with a filmmaker or songwriter, but I think we've got our all-around best options already, and they're all (basically) 19th century.
Came here to say this and I'm not even American. It's definitely Twain.
Though other American countries (even just North American countries) might have different opinions, so maybe he's just the USA's Homer.
Would anyone go out of their way to read any of Twain if it wasn’t required high school reading?
Also the American Homer is/was Garrison Keillor. Homer’s delivery was oral and radio is surely closer to oratory than books.
I did. I read some of Twain in high school but didn't really "get it", in hindsight. Then as I grew older and began reading many of Twain's endless quotes it made me want to go read more of his works, and I'm glad I did.
I think high school readings are quite pointless in general, because most kids either aren't mentally developed enough, or aren't going to have the focus, to actually "get" what's being said - at least not beyond the point of cramming enough stuff down to be able to puke it back up on a test/report.
That was certainly the case for me and I think this is extremely common given there are plenty of people that think Huck Finn is a racist book, when the entire underlying message is a never-ending mockery of racism.
> because most kids either aren't mentally developed
I've gone back and read so many books I was supposed to have read in HS and college. I don't think at the time I had the life experience to fully grasp many of the message(s). It's one thing for a teacher or guide to explain in abstract the underlying messages, it's another to have dealt with them in your own life and see yourself in the characters [1].
[1] I always read like I'm one or more of the characters and not simply an observer.
Maybe the point of high school readings is just to give you some books that will be relatable when you’re finally an adult.
I was raised where Sam Clemens was raised. People not only read the books. They tour his home. They tour the cave from Tom Sawyer. They attend the annual National Tom Sawyer days. They come from all over the world.
Its not required reading in the UK and I still read Twain, as did my kids.
Plato (who came long after Homer) complained about "kids these days" not memorizing poetry (like the old farts did) and using that new fangled technology called "writing".
I love this thread and this question. I'm going to argue that it's Francis Ford Coppola. His Filmography in the 1970's I think captures America, the myth and the realities, for both their glamour and horror, better than anyone else before or after.
1972 -- The Godfather -- This encapsulates the American Dream better than anything else. It captures the arc of an immigrant story, of fitting in with America, and what it takes to succeed.
1974 -- The Conversation -- Chronicles where America is going as technology and politics changes and the impacts on our culture, through one man at the center of it.
1974 -- The Godfather Part II -- The story of an America and the image that it's built up, and the bloodshed necessary to both get there, and to cleanse its hands from the past.
1979 -- Apocalypse Now -- The sins of a nation that's ascended, and how the rest of the world must deal with America, and what it does to the psyche of those charged with empire building.
There's a body of work there that captures America in its totality more comprehensively than what anyone else has done. If I had to reduce this down to one choice, then it's simply The Godfather.
Unfortunately that title is already reserved in the US for Homer Simpson.
I suppose that begs the question, who was ancient Greece's Homer Simpson?
Mainly βωμολόχος, I think? But also ἀλαζών in some episodes?
Socrates, I'd say.
Diogenes of Sinope is maybe closer? He was sort of a living meme and there's a significant volume of apocryphal anecdotes of hijinks and pseudepigraphical writings, going on long after his death.
Definitely Diogenes, 100%
Nooo...it has to be Margites from Homer's Margites :)
Simpson, eh? I'll remember that name!
I always found it relevant that in Spanish-dubs they translate the name of Homer to "Homero" which would be basically how you would refer to the classic author rather than to some american layman. (as if e.g. in France I translated Homer as Homère instead of plainly Homer).
Ergo, Matt Groening.
It has been argued that Sam Simons was the one that really honed in the characters of The Simpsons. Groening would throw out all kinds of weird ideas, like Marge was secretly a rabbit (thus the high hair), but Simons kept grounding the characters back into a form of reality.
Sam was a pretty awesome guy. There’s a real sincerity and earnestness to early Simpsons which came from the vision you’re describing.
He left the show after only 4 seasons, but I like to think his influence on the writing was a big contributor to the shows golden years.
The most technically correct answer is Walt Whitman.
Longfellow got dismissed by several people here for being too sentimental - but I would argue that sentimentality and saccharine character is distinctly part of America's mythos.
Washington Irving and Parson Weems would both also be good candidates. Early writers who had a penchant for mixing real history with tall tales.
The name I would throw out is John Ford. Ford basically invented the modern action movie, the mythology of the West, redefined masculinity, established the tropes of a hero, etc.
> The most technically correct answer is Walt Whitman
why?
[dead]
That would be the poet-king Yoyontzin¹, not any of these post-Columbus nitwits.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nezahualcoyotl_(tlatoani)
Poetry has fallen out of favor in culture at large, so I think it’s more logical to expand the question to authors more generally.
In that case, I think The Great Gatsby is the most logical equivalent to the Iliad and Odyssey. To me it conveys the essential elements of the American character: obsessed with reinvention via commerce, but inevitably tied to the past. It’s also probably been read by the majority of Americans, or at least the story is well-known. Can’t say the same for Twain, Melville, etc.
For more recent authors though, I think Don DeLillo is the best chronicler of mid-late century America.
Poetry morphed into rap.
That’s a common idea but I don’t think it holds up to scrutiny.
Putting poetry to music has a long history: see Homer, for example. And I don’t think there is much continuity between people that were writing poetry who later started writing rap. Different worlds, different audiences.
I do agree that some of the cultural desire for complex and creative language-play definitely is met in hip hop and rap, though.
I don't think poetry morphed into rap, rap is poetry. It also happens to be the most popular type of poetry now.
easy one:
"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." Ernest Hemingway
An odd question. America's "founding myths" are the Declaration of Independence and The Constitution.
These are the Holy Scriptures, and - like the Homeric ones - have multiple authors but lack the obscurity of ancient history to allow that latter fact to be subsumed into the story as a single, blind bard.
> the Declaration of Independence and The Constitution.
> These are the Holy Scriptures, and - like the Homeric ones - have multiple authors but lack the obscurity of ancient history to allow that latter fact to be subsumed into the story as a single, blind bard.
Nonetheless that hasn't stopped us from almost deifying the founding fathers. If not for the fact that many of them were slaveowners, they'd be deified already. Clearly, US society hasn't advanced beyond deification of its leaders, whether past or present.
Also, although they involve Gods, the Iliad and Odyssey are not religious texts in the sense of the Bible. They were epic legendary poems, not scriptures.
Our founding myths are actually Paul Bunyan and Blue. There's a whole cast of figures like Tom Thumb and more, structured around railway construction across America. Sadly, those myths have rapidly fallen from modern awareness, but they at one time were deeply embedded in the American identity, at least in a hokey tall-tales sort of way.
Homer was not supposed to be holy founding text?
I like the alternatives suggested in this thread over what is being proposed in the article:
* Mark Twain * Matt Groening
They are people who have captured the zeitgeist of their time and immortalized it in their art. They deliver their (countercultural) messages in an accessible and relatable way and have had a huge impact on our society.
I would add Shel Silverstein as my personal favorite.
isn't it obviously steinbeck?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_of_Eden_(novel)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath (one of the best books i've ever read)
Steinbeck by far. The Grapes of Wrath is frighteningly relevant now even almost 100 years later..
I think that steinbeck is probably the correct answer. the iliad and the odyssey are not just "action epics", they are parable-ish in what they communicate to readers (or listeners) of their society. For example, it's not a coincidence that odysseus sleeps around the aegean sea while penelope chases suitors off at home.
Twain is a pretty good second choice, but Steinbeck has a pretty good lock on parables of American aspirations and its society both good and bad.
Steinbeck also wrote "the pearl" and of course "of mice and men"
Lots of excellent suggestions here. F. Scott Fitzgerald's missing so far - that's not necessarily who I'd choose but he belongs in the conversation. I don't think he's an especially interesting pick - Gatsby is cited as the Great American Novel as often as Moby Dick or Huck Finn - but he's a superlative writer who (like every high schooler in the country knows) explicitly and directly engaged with the meaning of America.
Longfellow, and that’s a hill I’d die on. Or Shakespeare; I’d die on that hill too.
Willa Cather?
Homer, or the Homeric tradition, arose as rootless people displaced by drought and war in ~1,000 BC needed to sell the idea that entertaining stranger guests who had only stories from afar was worth doing, and that they shared common gods (versus the city-specific gods of earlier). This mind-set supported looser city-state alliances and cultures open to trading and ideas, who then outgrew the more xenophobic cities (like the Etruscans). So they semi-accidentally created a legitimizing belief system and thereby stumbled into founder roles.
America as the land of opportunity has flourished by acquiring more land and capturing value better, mainly by diminishing obligations to country and god and fellow humans. Yes, many writers bore witness to the frictions this involved with varying degrees of acuity or tragi-comedy, but no American writer wrote in a way that actually established this American mindset.
I think instead the mindset is perpetuated by each era building achievement heroes, stimulating belief in unbounded personal possibility. American literature is reduced to pointing out the vacuous consequences. As William Carlos-Williams wrote looking into his mirror in middle age, "I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so! [...] Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?"
If I had a vote, I'd nominate Willa Cather as the writer who portrayed that knowing moment of the powerless, non-achieving people enthralled with the beauty of nature as it was being destroyed. It's not what guides Americans prospectively, but it might best reflect history's perspective and our own retrospectives.
(I should add that I'm glad America has hoisted individuals and done so much to lift the global standards of living and care, even if it was more by greed and necessity than charity.)
Man sees Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (2026) one time..
Stephen King. Homer was not great literature at the time he his works were written. He was popular entertainment with a dose of folk religion. I’m not sure Homer existed. 1000 years from now people will say the same of SK.
"Homer was not great literature at the time he his works were written".
They were not written at all. No written literature existed in the time of Homer.
I can write a poem in my head without ever writing it down on paper. I still wrote a poem, even if I just pass it along orally.
If I write a song for my girl, I'm not going to hand her a piece of paper with sheet music and lyrics, I'm going to perform it for her. I may write it down, or I may not.
Of course, composed is a more precise word, but everyone still knows what I mean if I replace it with write.
You can take note. Writing is a physical action, e.g. performing output.
Writing is an action. You can memorize, take a mental note, but you are not writing.
(Someone else mentioned Camōes, a portuguese who famously/allegedly saved his writings from a shipwreck by swimming with one arm and using the other to keep the book above water; your interpretation of "writing" is an insult)
> I can write a poem in my head without ever writing it down on paper. I still wrote a poem, even if I just pass it along orally
This is generalising the term writing to the point of uselessness. In your example, you thought of a poem and spoke it. You didn't write it.
Disagree, I think it's analogous to how we today use "fire" to describe the action of loosing an arrow or whatever the technical term is for a trebuchet, even though neither has gunpowder.
I don’t think so. The colloquial usage exists as grandparent commenter describes. I can be a “songwriter” without literally writing the lyrics to my song down.
Are you also calling it literature if it's not written down?
How long after were these put down as writings ?
Homer was near god status even then.
I'm really not sure how anything else could be interpreted? I think this was actually very much to people's frustration even, as Homer was often misunderstood in their eyes, e.g. Plato often expresses this sentiment.
...you think 1000 years from now people will wonder whether or not Stephen King existed?
Probably sooner, IMO. Absent radical life extension, even 200 years from now there'll be nobody's left who remembers the time before deepfakes, and history will be brought into doubt.
Though bluntly we've always had nationalistic narratives contaminating what's "approved" in school, both with literature and history. Stephen King could be anything from mandatory to forbidden for any reason at the same time in different places, even on that kind of timescale. The USA may cease to exist as a singular coherent entity, and it may be two or more successor states in parallel who have a culture war with each other over if Stephen King was real or not.
Good question. No. Since the press was invented, our records have improved tremendously, partially because of the low cost of maintaing them. However, we still have detailed records from many eras, tracing back at least 3000 years. The egyptians had archeologists, let that sink in.
You are technically right, but I believe the spirit of the question was "how significant Stephen King would be a 1000 years from now?".
Some fun trivia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ea-n%C4%81%E1%B9%A3ir
A side note: the article starts with "If England has Shakespeare, Spain has Cervantes, Italy has Dante, and Russia has Pushkin, then who do we have?" but does not mention China: usually Li Bai (李白) and Du Fu (杜甫) from Tang Dynasty (1300 years ago) are regarded the best poets in the history of China. Li Bai is nicknamed Immortal of Poetry (诗仙), while Du Fu is nicknamed the Saint of Poetry (诗圣). Most scholars like Du Fu better because his poems' use of all the connotative overtones, but most regular people like Li Bai better because his poems are easier to understand.
Homer Simpson - was my first thought when I read this...
Weird Al, obviously. He’s the only one capable of combining our oral traditions into a single coherent body of work.
no talk about the only american writer with the guts to try to be like homer? the battlefield where the moon says i love you by frank stanford. obscure just like homer was in his time.
also, no mention in these comments about william faulkner?
though, i would bet money that "the american homer" will be somebody most readers have never heard of.
it's definitely not twain or hemingway, like everybody is saying. if you think it's twain, then it is faulkner, who was the first white writer to not write a one dimensional black character.
and no talk about toni morrison?? zora neale hurston??? do y'all read american literature?
Barlow?
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8683/8683-h/8683-h.htm
I wouldn't actually vote for him but I don't think he should be forgotten and he should be mentioned in such a discussion. I would probably say Stein, solely for The Making of Americans.
> Do we have a great poet who captures the American spirit, the American story, the American identity?
Dare I suggest Bob Dylan?
Odd to include Chapman and not Dylan. Much like leaving out Twain - seems like the defacto choice to me.
maggots festering upon a corpse have very little to do with its spirit, story, or identity.
Reducing these countries to a single name is probably the reason why we can guess this was written by an american; each country has at least a bunch of inspired authors per couple of generations. The country it is actively being bombed right now is the "modern" reincarnation of a nation that is roughly 10x older than the US. We all know who american Homer is, and this is the first year ever we whish we was the president. Friggin noobs.
To be clear, there are excellent american authors, and many comments mention them; its more of a "why am I reading stupid questions about history?"
The "stupid" question is generating a lot of interesting conversation.
Homer is the Homer of America, unless you believe in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.
(cf Saul Bellow asking “who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus”, and Ralph Wiley in the Atlantic saying that Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus.)
How about Cormac McCarthy?
Yes.
Probably more Socrates or Plato, but I feel like Emerson needs to be mentioned in this thread somewhere.
The stories still passed down and translated into other languages two thousand years from now will be the answer. I think Sherman's memoirs could become something like the Iliad. They're surprisingly funny, engaging, and insightful, and Mark Twain (mentioned in this comment thread) had a hand in the memoirs IIRC.
I saw the title and thought they were looking for a real Homer Simpson.
I didn't think that, but despite being in jest my head immediately answered "simpson"
Solid read.
Recommendations elaborated on in the article are a solid set. Mark Twain or Walt Whitman would probably get my vote.
Woody Guthrie, who gets a mention in the article, would get my vote.
I would argue that while poets and playwrights are a solid choice for ancient Greece, Music and Movies is the equivalent for America. Woody Guthrie is a solid choice because he traveled and collected folk music which was reflected in his own expressions.
As for movies I would want Jim Jarmusch to be Americas Homer, just because I like his movies a lot. But in reality I think the Coen Brothers are a more solid choice (aside from the fact that they have indeed adopted the Odyssey as an American folk story in Oh Brother Where Art Thou)
Steven Spielberg is probably the Homer of American cinema.
I would more consider him a Shakespeare of American Cinema rather then a Homer. Shakespeare was a prolific playwright (and a poet) who wrote plays about varied subjects and situations across the World of, some of his plays are of legendary status, and others not so great (same is true of Spielberg’s movies). Shakespeare’s plays (just like Spielberg) are also grounded in history and fiction rather then folk art and local legends and mythology. Also Spielberg is rather keen on adopting other people’s work to the big screen, which is a bit disqualifying* in this regard.
If you compare Jim Jarmusch who writes about epic road trips of regular people across the country, prisoners on the run from the law seeking the American dream, Vampires, Samurai hit-man in New York, then you start seeing how he reflects on American folk culture and mythology in his movies grounded in stories about American people (ditto Coen Brothers) much like Homer’s work on ancient Greek legends and myths grounded in stories about Greek society at the time.
What I am saying is that while Spielberg (just like Shakespeare) is a prolific director that has left us with many masterpieces (and other not-so-good pieces) he has not captured American legends, American mythology, nor American folk stories in ways Homer captured the Greek legends, mythology and folk stories. Both Jim Jarmusch and the Coen Brothers however have done so masterfully.
---
*: I know Woody Guthrie also played covers and collected folk music and redemption songs, but that is a bit different then adopting an already successful and widely known book into another format (ditto Homer).
Spielberg has dealt with a few American tropes: UFO encounters, WW2 service men, slavery, monster sharks, road chases, cowboy archaeologists, tricksters, Abraham Lincoln, and hauntings.
Coen Brothers are a good call
I feel like Stevie Wonder is a better choice than most proposed here
America's Homer is Shakespeare!
Albeit a British show, but valid nonetheless. https://youtu.be/t1d3lIcuEMU
Lotta obvious answers left off because this seems to be about poets specifically.
laughs in Melville
From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.
The contrarian in me wants to say Margaret Mitchell.
Isn't simpson enough
No one mentioning Gore Vidal (or Truman Capote)... so sad
Tracy Chapman is a really really good pick!
I would pick F. Scott Fitzgerald. His book, The Great Gatsby, showed us that the 1920s in America was a highly divided society that was corrupted by materialism and more. His pessimism gives us a pretty good view into the past.
Why?
“Do we have a great poet who captures the American spirit, the American story, the American identity?”
No. There’s no singular “American identity” or story to capture. The U.S. has produced some amazing writers and storytellers who are, IMO, equal to the greats of other countries, but we have no collective identity that can be captured by a single person.
But if you put a gun to my head to identify one, I might argue for Steven Spielberg. If the U.S. has a Homer they’re not a poet or writer, they’re a filmmaker or TV producer.
The films he’s directed certainly capture big parts of the American mythologies, perhaps the largest of a single person.
Another option: Norman Lear. Maybe even more than Spielberg with All in the Family, Good Times, The Jeffersons, One Day at a Time… yeah. He definitely nailed a broad slice of American culture for a good chunk of time.
this is not super productive, but not including “Germany has Goethe” in the opening line turned me off immediately
And France has Molière, and Portugal has Camões...how many authors should be listed?
If you are a 250 year old nation built on "stolen land" (by the europeans, mind you), I would assume not many. But the US has been home to many great writers. This is just stupid.
All land is "stolen". The people the US "stole" the land from had "stolen" it from someone else and so on and so forth.
Frank Lloyd Wright. The true spirit of America is building.
I think this is a category error. Homer is the iconic writer of the Ancient Greek language and culture, not the modern nation of Greece. Cervantes and Dante are the iconic writers in the Spanish and Italian languages, respectively, not the nations of Spain or Italy. Italy wouldn't even exist as a nation until 500 years after Dante.
The American equivalent of Homer, Dante, or Cervantes is Shakespeare.
Hot take (with recency bias): Ron Chernow
Homer and Virgil were historians at the end of the day. Whether what they reported as happening was true or not is as irrelevant as whether Alexander Hamilton threw away his shot at Aaron Burr or not. Their writings, just like Chernow’s, are steeped in legend.
Chernow’s work has excellently captured:
Alexander Hamilton John D Rockefeller JP Morgan Ulysses (!) S. Grant Etc.
As I type this out, perhaps the best comparison for Chernow is actually Plutarch? Either way, I haven’t seen anyone mention him and that would be an unfortunate oversight.
U guys will not agree i think, but for us, the non-usa, majority gonna choose Stephen king, he is your culture, the USA culture btw is 50s to 2000s and he capture all the feeling
We probably need more time to say for sure, but it might be David Chase. The Sopranos is partly an extended character study of someone who strives to fill American values as we imagine ourselves but also embodies American values as they actually exist.
I cannot answer that and I think it will be years before, so I went with "Nobody Yet".
Tracy Chapman is an interesting pick, but I think she could be in the future. But I am surprised Thoreau was not in the list, at least from what I was able to read.
No Mark Twain?
America doesn't have a "Homer", because it has a very rich competitive market.
In the USSR, people of multiple generations grew up watching the same things, e.g. "Nu Pogodi"
In the USA, every 10 years there's some new genre of music, or artists being promoted.
Homer is known because back then, very few people could even read - let alone write. Actually, Homer couldn't, I think.
> England has Shakespeare, Spain has Cervantes, Italy has Dante, and Russia has Pushkin
Author is conveniently avoiding mentioning France, which does not have a major figure weighing on the others that much. Hugo is probably the most homeric of the classic French litterature, but he’s much more recent and nowhere nearly as dominant as Shakespeare in England or Cervantes in Spain (which borders on the ridiculous in both countries imo).
It’s a better situation not to have an Homer but a constellation of good stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Appleseed
Cormac McCarthy gets my vote.
English majors seem to have banded together to crown only the most inaccessible and politically charged authors as worthy of attention. If you like anyone else, you're just too inexperienced or partisan to appreciate real literature. To hell with them.
The answer is Brandon Sanderson who is freely sharing his knowledge of how to write with the world. His teachings will touch more in the coming years than any stodgy 1920s writer ever cared to.
This would make a great stand-up bit. You know, the kind you do on stage, to make people laugh.
Which of the proposed answers in the linked article would you characterize as one or both of "inaccessible" and "politically charged"?
I think a couple are bad answers (Wilder? She's fine-ish, but America's Homer? Very, very, no) but can't figure out which ones might be striking you that way.
As much as I love just about everything about Sando, he doesn’t hold a candle to Mark Twain.
I think this is a recency bias in effect.
But damn, Sanderson writes some great stories.
Someone else brought up Spielberg and I think a pretty good argument could be made there. But Twain has already stood the test of time.
What on earth is "politically charged" or "inaccessible" about Frost or Ingalls Wilder? It's not like they threw in Gertrude Stein or William Gaddis.
For Ingalls Wilder, see the following
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Ingalls_Wilder#Political...
Sure, but her writing wasn't in any way political.
>>English majors seem to have banded together to crown only the most inaccessible and politically charged authors as worthy of attention
Tell me you're an Engineer/don't hang out with actual "English Majors" (I'm 41, I don't spend much time on The Quad these days) without telling me as much.
Lit nerds love nothing more than fighting over the Canon (which, is the point of the article). To hell with banishing whole groups because you're lazy and stereotyping (this sentence is ironic considering the start of the paragraph...)
Brandon Sanderson writes forgettable stories for pubescent children. His characters fill very specific plot roles and those plots don't really deviate in any interesting way. Saying he's Temu Terry Pratchett is doing a giant disservice to Pratchett.
Do you consider Frost inaccessible (or for that matter politically-charged)? I think every kid who grows up in New England reads him in elementary or middle school.
Homer is America's Homer. Homer is western civilization's Homer. Thousands of Americans have composed epics, but Homer is still the one with primacy. All succeeding epics defer to Homer, including the American ones.
I'd go with Ogden Nash as the most American "American" poet. He's my horse in the race.
I think of Herman Melville's 'Moby-Dick' as representing America.
How so? Serious question, hoping to see you make a point that will get downvoted because it's right :)
Aside: I have been somewhat busy and maybe even too emotionally preoccupied with other stuff to help people here listen to their anger
The teaching-by-jesting is a difficult calling and I don't practise enough! At least not in fields outside my main interests :)
If you don't mind me asking, what are the topics that you do think deeply about? I'm not sure you write about these in the blogs?
Maybe my second interest can be codified as the study of
HN sometimes help, but it's been mostly monologue interspersed with some .. interesting moments such as theseHomer's stories are essentially mythological. 'Huckleberry Finn,' on the other hand, feels more like satire than myth. But 'Moby-Dick' carries that mythic quality. Ahab is a whaling captain, but at the same time, he appears as a tragic king confronting a world he cannot understand or accept. And Moby Dick seems to symbolize both an animal and nature itself.
Homer's epics feature human heroes who converse with divine beings. 'Moby-Dick' doesn't have that, but the overall atmosphere is mystical enough that I see it that way.
The Pequod is both a commercial vessel and a representation of the American national system. The sea is described as a geographical space, yet also as a universe beyond human comprehension.
There's no question that Mark Twain is a great author representing America. But if I had to choose one mythic work in American literature that corresponds to Homer, I would choose Herman Melville's 'Moby-Dick'.
Ah good points, in fact some points that deepen our understanding of Homer.
Main one you might have thought about is that the gods of Homer are also deeply flawed (habitually full of hubris themselves!).. I think it was Nietzsche who said that the gods wish they could be Achilles or Odysseus?
Now.. who are the conflicting partys in every Homeric arc? Often at least 2 gods..
(I have not thought about Moby Dick this way either, or the "Greek system" in those days.. palace economy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_economy
In The World of Odysseus he noted that most distribution was internal:[5]
How American am I? I literally thought this was about Homer Simpson
George Lucas
I think one of the beautiful things about America is its formation as a country contains so many nations, and in a way America’s cultural history is inseparable from those nations it contains (newly formed) extensions of. America is a young country made from the offshoots of old countries. So in some ways, I think America’s Homer can simply be Homer, just as America’s Shakespeare can be - if an American chooses - Shakespeare. That’s a beautiful idea for a nation.
To think about the question less evasively, for me, it depends on which aspect of Homer is primary. I’m restricting myself here to widely read texts which I think have had vast impact on national character.
If it’s the idea of suffering, frontier, and the impossible but attempted journey, I find it hard to look beyond Melville. Not just for Moby Dick, but I would argue Bartleby, the Scrivener is an incredibly prophetic work about how regular people would come to experience the deep strangeness of modern American life.
If it’s a question of language - of how we write and speak to each other - so much of American language rests on Hemingway. This answer is unavoidable for me. In American communication, so much value is placed on clarity, and brevity, and the idea of “cool”.
If it’s Homer as an epic, sweet, sad, narratively-loose, arguably-multi-authored, and kind-of-orally-told document of American life, widely shared: Why not Homer Simpson? The Simpsons is art at its best, and has clear export and staying power for audiences.
I think the real answer is probably that it’s too early to say. Bob Dylan will probably be on this list in a century - but I think the ways his work is prophetic of future art and the broader future world have not quite formed into reality yet.
Scott Fitzgerald might be there if America’s 21st century experience is so defined by striving, (self) deception, and startlingly violent tragedy as its 20th century was.
Similarly, if America stays as strange and psychedelic and new as it has been in the 20th century, a case could be made for H P Lovecraft.
While I don’t personally enjoy Lovecraft’s prose, his ideas are increasingly prescient. In the 20th century, Americans walked on the moon. In the 21st, Americans have invented - in the consumer LLM - a thing for which the most tractable analogy is Cthulu, with its many-faces of a single entity, its cultists, and its nondeterministic and unknowable - or incomprehensible - non-human motivation or end-point, which can only really be described as a desire for its own momentum.
It may well end up being Lovecraft.
Some good takes so I hate to be glib but no one because 1. the US was founded long after the invention of writing and even the printing press plus 2. bronze age morality and worldview are completely alien to us in ways that no subculture in the US is.
The article references "England has Shakespeare (1600s), Spain has Certantes (1600s) Russia has Pushkin (1800s)" whom I assume are intended as their nations' versions.
You going to stand on your statement with that as a reference? We're closer to Pushkin than Pushkin was to Homer.
Heh, we're closer to the Beowulf poet than the Beowulf poet was to Homer.
For me, it's Steinbeck. I think his novels capture the uniqueness American spirit, good and bad. Generosity and stubbornness, a contrast of high ideals and actions that don't always live up to them, but sometimes surpass them. They are practical stories about real people we've probably met but don't fully understand.
Cannery Row, To a God Unknown and Tortilla Flat are easy to read examples of this if you don't want to commit to East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath. Travels with Charley is also a log of America in the 60s, even if you take it as a novel.
I can't argue against Whitman though.
Since nobody seems to want to do it, I'll throw Kurk Vonnegut out. We're a satire of a nation and he's our greatest satirist (sorry Sam Clemmens, you're too earnest, even when telling a joke.)
lol, a country not even 300 years, and Homer is ~3000 years ago. The Hollywood fixation is unreal.
Homer is a voice from antiquity. How many American stories and storytellers will be remembered and widely known in a millennium or 3? It will take a long time before we have a definitive answer.
Such a person may not have been born yet. Maybe we need to go back to the stone age and rebuild civilization before a bard as reputable as Homer appears in what we currently call America.
Longfellow springs to mind. Not my personal favourite, but wrote epics in meter.
Some other suggestions are in the wrong genre.
Likely there are some native American bards who were nearer to Homer in spirit.
Homer Simpson
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeric_Question
There is some debate as to whether Homer was an individual or actually a title used by multiple authors.
Chuck Tingle
Matt Groening.
Homer simpson obviously
Homer
Simpson
George Gershwin for his musicals. George Lucas and/or Spielberg for Indiana Jones. I considered loughead for publishing Paul Bunyan or Jack London for the likes of Call of the Wild. Poe is a strong contender as is Dashiell Hammett.
Poe
Mark Twain gets my vote, but my Southern bias might be at hand.
Outis.
Stop kidding yourself, you don't have the history or culture or wit to have a Homer, other than Simpson.
C-f Mark Twain
Nada.
Seriously?
Mark Twain
Bernie Sanders.
The FIFA Prize in Literature goes to Trump.
Okay, here's who popped into my head right away: Rod Serling. I know, most people meet Homer on the page and think of him as a poet. But for the people who first heard him, he was just a storyteller. The poems, with their gods and monsters and outrageous adventures, really just let him talk about the stuff everyone knew—human screw-ups, disappointments, all of it.
Serling did the same thing. The Twilight Zone wasn't actually about space aliens or killer ventriloquist dummies. That stuff was just window dressing. What he really wanted to tackle was prejudice, fear, the way we all go along with the group, greed, war, power—real-world ugliness, just in disguise. The science fiction wasn't the point. It let him slip tough questions past people's defenses.
And the timing mattered. Think about when Serling wrote. America right after World War II, everyone anxious about the Cold War, McCarthy running witch hunts, the civil rights fight heating up, and nobody sure what the new nuclear world would bring. Each week, millions of people sat down for the same shared story. If Homer gave the Greeks their way of thinking about their world, Serling did something like that for Americans finding their way through the 20th century.
I'd throw out another name, too. Vin Scully. Sounds weird until you remember that Homer was an oral storyteller first, long before school teachers made him homework.
What did Scully do for sixty-plus years? Storytelling. A Dodgers game wasn't just a game if he was on the mic. He wove this endless tapestry of history, jokes, heartbreaks, odd facts about players you'd never heard of, and by the third out you cared about all of them. He gave baseball this sense of belonging, like it was its own little world, with memories that mattered. And what is more American than baseball?
Honestly, that's the most Homer-like thing. Before Homer was something you read, he was a voice everyone leaned in to hear together. Scully did that, too—families, whole neighborhoods, strangers all listening to the same man at the same time, sharing a story as it happened.
We don't do that much anymore—share the same story, at the same time. We're pros at binging our own shows in private. Scully deserves a spot in this conversation, not just because baseball is some American Iliad, but because he did what Homer did first: he spun day-to-day events into a story everyone remembered together.
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Americas Homer would be a film director. Maybe Coppola?
Edit: Someone below mentioned Ford, also a good pick