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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.
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.
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
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?
It’s obviously Twain.
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.
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.
"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.
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
Unfortunately that title is already reserved in the US for Homer Simpson.
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.
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.
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
That would be the poet-king Yoyontzin¹, not any of these post-Columbus nitwits.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
> Do we have a great poet who captures the American spirit, the American story, the American identity?
Dare I suggest Bob Dylan?
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.
Homer Simpson - was my first thought when I read this...
How about Cormac McCarthy?
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.
Weird Al, obviously. He’s the only one capable of combining our oral traditions into a single coherent body of work.
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.
Solid read.
Recommendations elaborated on in the article are a solid set. Mark Twain or Walt Whitman would probably get my vote.
Probably more Socrates or Plato, but I feel like Emerson needs to be mentioned in this thread somewhere.
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.)
Lotta obvious answers left off because this seems to be about poets specifically.
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.
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.
From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.
I saw the title and thought they were looking for a real Homer Simpson.
It's been scholarly consensus for many years that "Homer" was not a single person, and that the Odyssey was constructed over centuries by many oral poets.
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
Albeit a British show, but valid nonetheless.
https://youtu.be/t1d3lIcuEMU
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.
The contrarian in me wants to say Margaret Mitchell.
Isn't simpson enough