Who Is America's Homer?

https://www.plough.com/articles/who-is-americas-homer

by samclemens • 8 days ago

106 239 8 days ago

slwvx2• 8 days ago

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

bsder2• 7 days ago

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.

readread2• 7 days ago

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.

jimbob452• 3 days ago

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.

somenameforme2• 3 days ago

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.

graemep3• 2 days ago

Its not required reading in the UK and I still read Twain, as did my kids.

Tangurena22• 2 days ago

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".

cestith4• 2 days ago

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.

marcus_holmes2• 3 days ago

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.

killthebuddha• 7 days ago

this is not super productive, but not including “Germany has Goethe” in the opening line turned me off immediately

FeteCommuniste4• 7 days ago

And France has Molière, and Portugal has Camões...how many authors should be listed?

aforwardslash6• 7 days ago

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.

brightball2• 7 days ago

Solid read.

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

runarberg3• 7 days ago

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)

wk_end4• 7 days ago

Steven Spielberg is probably the Homer of American cinema.

brightball2• 7 days ago

Coen Brothers are a good call

freetime2• 7 days ago

Unfortunately that title is already reserved in the US for Homer Simpson.

brudgers• 7 days ago

Ergo, Matt Groening.

ColdStream• 3 days ago

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.

HPsquared• 7 days ago

I suppose that begs the question, who was ancient Greece's Homer Simpson?

wk_end4• 7 days ago

Socrates, I'd say.

ben_w3• 3 days ago

Mainly βωμολόχος, I think? But also ἀλαζών in some episodes?

SoftTalker• 3 days ago

Simpson, eh? I'll remember that name!

AshamedCaptain• 2 days ago

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).

sfRattan• 7 days ago

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.

bryanrasmussen3• 7 days ago

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.

EGreg2• 7 days ago

Poe

Twain

riffraff• 7 days ago

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.

FeteCommuniste4• 7 days ago

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.

maxerickson• 3 days ago

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.

bsder2• 7 days ago

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.

legitster2• 7 days ago

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.

oliculipolicula5• 7 days ago

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

colordrops• 3 days ago

Kubrick

B1FF_PSUVM• 3 days ago

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.

dnautics2• 3 days ago

popping inflated egos is the mythology of America

api• 3 days ago

Are you sure that works against the mythology of America?

Questioning authority and mythology is very American.

dredmorbius• 2 days ago

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.

paradox4602• 3 days ago

Twain or Steinbeck. I'd say anyone else is folly

cestith4• 2 days ago

Even Bob Dylan?

sva_• 3 days ago

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.

etempleton• 3 days ago

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.

matt_daemon• 3 days ago

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"

rayiner2• 3 days ago

It’s obviously Twain.

cgyvbunji3• 3 days ago

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

assimpleaspossi5• 3 days ago

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.

bryanrasmussen3• 3 days ago

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."

anthuswilliams• 3 days ago

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.

bee_rider2• 3 days ago

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.

lubujackson2• 3 days ago

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?

larodi• 3 days ago

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.

graemep3• 2 days ago

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.

skywhopper• 2 days ago

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.

tracker1• 2 days ago

Literally came to say the same... Mark Twain was my first thought here.

pdonis• 2 days ago

I think it is somewhat weird that nobody put Twain in.

Twain wasn't a poet. The article specifies right at the start that it's looking for a great American poet.

deboboy• 2 days ago

The lowest person in a society is a doorway to the structure of that society. Twain narrated this regardless of whether we consider it poetry or folkloric fiction.

kayo_20211030• 7 days ago

I'd go with Ogden Nash as the most American "American" poet. He's my horse in the race.

yaman12• 7 days ago

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.

01284a7e• 7 days ago

"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.

stronglikedan• 7 days ago

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.

agumonkey• 7 days ago

How long after were these put down as writings ?

wk_end4• 7 days ago

...you think 1000 years from now people will wonder whether or not Stephen King existed?

aforwardslash6• 7 days ago

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.

ben_w3• 3 days ago

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.

asimpletune• 3 days ago

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.

jimbokun• 7 days ago

No Mark Twain?

blfr• 7 days ago

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.

moate4• 7 days ago

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.

FeteCommuniste4• 7 days ago

Heh, we're closer to the Beowulf poet than the Beowulf poet was to Homer.

jmclnx• 7 days ago

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.

mathisfun123• 7 days ago

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)

arkis22• 3 days ago

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"

morkalork• 3 days ago

Steinbeck by far. The Grapes of Wrath is frighteningly relevant now even almost 100 years later..

zabzonk• 7 days ago

Do we have a great poet who captures the American spirit, the American story, the American identity?

Dare I suggest Bob Dylan?

jolt42• 7 days ago

Odd to include Chapman and not Dylan. Much like leaving out Twain - seems like the defacto choice to me.

grey-area• 7 days ago

Outis.

jimbob452• 7 days ago

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.

y1n0• 7 days ago

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.

moate4• 7 days ago

>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...)

FeteCommuniste4• 7 days ago

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.

slwvx2• 7 days ago

For Ingalls Wilder, see the following

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Ingalls_Wilder#Political...

readread2• 7 days ago

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.

apical_dendrite2• 3 days ago

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.

MisterBastahrd• 2 days ago

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.

scampbe3• 2 days ago

This would make a great stand-up bit. You know, the kind you do on stage, to make people laugh.

gabeiscoding• 7 days ago

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

jcynix• 7 days ago

How about Cormac McCarthy?

BiraIgnacio• 2 days ago

Yes.

sam0x17• 7 days ago

Mark Twain

Avshalom• 7 days ago

Lotta obvious answers left off because this seems to be about poets specifically.

moate4• 7 days ago

laughs in Melville

moate4• 7 days ago

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.)

wk_end4• 7 days ago

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.

legitster2• 7 days ago

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.

JumpCrisscross2• 7 days ago

The most technically correct answer is Walt Whitman

why?

leavesofwalt• 7 days ago

Unable to speak to why gp said so, but I have a few reasons why.

In the mid to late 1800s and early 1900s philosophers, writers, and poets were all talking about how "this newly formed country" needed its own Epic Poet that embodied the spirit of the country, ala Homer, Milton, Basho, Virgil, Dante, Kālidāsa, et al. This pursuit is also where the phrase "the great American novel" comes from.

The philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an essay on the subject; defining what qualities, to him, such a poet would require.

This essay, The Poet, inspired Whitman to write his epic poem Song of Myself, with such qualities, that would, in later editions, become his collection of poems Leaves of Grass.

Emerson read the first edition and wrote Whitman a letter all but proclaiming him the poet he was imagining, noting "I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet contributed."

It became a point of contention between the two when Whitman published this personal letter as the foreword of the second edition.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69389/from-the-poe...

https://whitmanarchive.org/item/loc.02109

Personally, I still think Leaves of Grass is "the most extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet contributed".

It still has opportunity for improvement, but as yet, the most extraordinary.

aforwardslash6• 7 days ago

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.

aforwardslash6• 7 days ago

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?"

CoastalCoder• 3 days ago

The "stupid" question is generating a lot of interesting conversation.

CoolestBeans• 7 days ago

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.

opengrass• 7 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Appleseed

blikdak• 7 days ago

Stop kidding yourself, you don't have the history or culture or wit to have a Homer, other than Simpson.

flitzofolov• 3 days ago

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.

d--b• 3 days ago

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.

sb057• 3 days ago

The contrarian in me wants to say Margaret Mitchell.

arikrahman• 3 days ago

Isn't simpson enough

philliproso• 3 days ago

Homer simpson obviously

paxys• 3 days ago

"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.

ofalkaed2• 3 days ago

Neither TFA or this thread are legally binding, there are no consequences other than some fun and maybe finding something new to read.

xenocratus• 3 days ago

I found paxys' comment fun, so you're right!

Erem• 3 days ago

Or Shakespeare for English

Tangurena22• 2 days ago

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.

chuckadams• 2 days ago

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.

FuriouslyAdrift2• 2 days ago

Sheol got turned into Hades, then Christianity mashed it together with Gehenna to create "Hell".

jdw642• 3 days ago

I think of Herman Melville's 'Moby-Dick' as representing America.

oliculipolicula5• 3 days ago

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

   Making breakthroughs for humanity every man-week of doing, not "breakthroughs" for a few men every thirty man-decades of "thinking"

HN sometimes help, but it's been mostly monologue interspersed with some .. interesting moments such as these

jdw642• 3 days ago

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'.

Beijinger• 3 days ago

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

EGreg2• 3 days ago

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.

ncfausti• 3 days ago

Probably more Socrates or Plato, but I feel like Emerson needs to be mentioned in this thread somewhere.

whall6• 3 days ago

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.

jrflowers• 3 days ago

Chuck Tingle

jzb• 3 days ago

“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.

apical_dendrite2• 3 days ago

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.

ofalkaed2• 3 days ago

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.

w10-1• 3 days ago

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.)

indoorfish• 3 days ago

Man sees Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (2026) one time..

sudo_cowsay• 3 days ago

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.

suddenlybananas• 3 days ago

Why?

holder1• 3 days ago

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

lapcat• 3 days ago

Homer Simpson

object-a• 3 days ago

Americas Homer would be a film director. Maybe Coppola?

Edit: Someone below mentioned Ford, also a good pick

nephihaha2• 3 days ago

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.

Fricken2• 3 days ago

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.

mellosouls• 3 days ago

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.

danans• 3 days ago

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.

lubujackson2• 3 days ago

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.

watwut• 3 days ago

Homer was not supposed to be holy founding text?

elromulous• 3 days ago

Albeit a British show, but valid nonetheless. https://youtu.be/t1d3lIcuEMU

hirvi74• 3 days ago

Mark Twain gets my vote, but my Southern bias might be at hand.

rawgabbit• 3 days ago

I saw the title and thought they were looking for a real Homer Simpson.

mghackerlady• 2 days ago

I didn't think that, but despite being in jest my head immediately answered "simpson"

bandrami• 3 days ago

Poe

lsb• 3 days ago

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.)

wwind123• 3 days ago

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.

wang_li• 3 days ago

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.

bitwize• 3 days ago

C-f Mark Twain

Nada.

Seriously?

berofeev• 3 days ago

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

bee_rider2• 3 days ago

Weird Al, obviously. He’s the only one capable of combining our oral traditions into a single coherent body of work.

seemaze• 3 days ago

Simpson

keiferski2• 3 days ago

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.

verzali• 3 days ago

Poetry morphed into rap.

keiferski2• 3 days ago

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.

quuxplusone• 2 days ago

It’s also probably been read by the majority of Americans, or at least the story is well-known.

Read by, yes. Story well-known, I doubt. What is the story of The Great Gatsby, in a few words? (But then again, what is the story of the Iliad, anyway? Something about the wrath of Achilles, right?) [I should clarify: to answer that the Iliad is about "the Trojan war" or "Achilles dragging the body of Hector" seems insufficient to me in the same way it would be insufficient to say that Gatsby is about "a guy who throws parties" or "a murder in a swimming pool."]

Twain is the obvious "American Homer" not just because his name pops immediately to mind, but also because his two best-known works (Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn) stand in the same relation to each other as the Iliad and Odyssey: a minor character in one becomes the protagonist of the other. As someone above already commented, too, both works are episodic and have given us many pop-culture images: I dare say only Tom's painting of the fence is proverbial, but the cave adventure, the feud, attending one's own funeral, and probably several more episodes are embedded in American pop culture to the same extent as the Cyclops, Circe, and the Lotus-Eaters. Gatsby is a great novel, but what has it given to our collective unconscious? The green light and... beautiful shirts?

What does it say that there have been three adequate film adaptations of Gatsby, while there have been (as far as I know) none at all of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, the Iliad, or the Odyssey?

(Side note: About 15 years ago I read Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned and thought it was very good and inventive; I recommend it. These days Wikipedia tells me that "many Fitzgerald scholars typically consider The Beautiful and Damned to be among the author's weaker novels," so maybe something excellent is waiting for me if I ever get around to reading This Side of Paradise or Tender is the Night.)

gabriel666smith• 3 days ago

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.

IMAYousaf• 3 days ago

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.

jway66• 3 days ago

Homer Simpson - was my first thought when I read this...

pr337h4m• 3 days ago

George Lucas

DaedalusII• 3 days ago

Homer

christudor• 3 days ago

America's Homer is Shakespeare!

bparsons• 3 days ago

Matt Groening.

mkovach• 3 days ago

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.

inopinatus• 3 days ago

That would be the poet-king Yoyontzin¹, not any of these post-Columbus nitwits.

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

coldbrew_dev• 3 days ago

How American am I? I literally thought this was about Homer Simpson

donatj• 2 days ago

Frank Lloyd Wright. The true spirit of America is building.

skruger• 2 days ago

Cormac McCarthy gets my vote.

Fricken2• 2 days ago

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.

rullelito• 2 days ago

lol, a country not even 300 years, and Homer is ~3000 years ago. The Hollywood fixation is unreal.

dfxm12• 2 days ago

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.

FuriouslyAdrift2• 2 days ago

No one mentioning Gore Vidal (or Truman Capote)... so sad

greenie_beans• 2 days ago

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?

seydor• 2 days ago

I feel like Stevie Wonder is a better choice than most proposed here

pyuser583• 2 days ago

Longfellow, and that’s a hill I’d die on. Or Shakespeare; I’d die on that hill too.

Who Is America's Homer?

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