Who Is America's Homer?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

"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

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nezahualcoyotl_(tlatoani)

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.

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.

The American equivalent of Homer, Dante, or Cervantes is Shakespeare.

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)

* 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.

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.

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.

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.)

Dare I suggest Bob Dylan?

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.

Recommendations elaborated on in the article are a solid set. Mark Twain or Walt Whitman would probably get my vote.

(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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Some other suggestions are in the wrong genre.

Likely there are some native American bards who were nearer to Homer in spirit.

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.

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.

There is some debate as to whether Homer was an individual or actually a title used by multiple authors.

Nada.

Seriously?

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.

Edit: Someone below mentioned Ford, also a good pick