Who Is America's Homer?

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

> 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.

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

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.

Cormac McCarthy gets my vote.

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.

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

George Lucas

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.)

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.

Homer Simpson

Chuck Tingle

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

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.

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 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.

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

Homer simpson obviously

Matt Groening.

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.

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.

Outis.

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

Mark Twain

C-f Mark Twain

Nada.

Seriously?

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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Bernie Sanders.

Americas Homer would be a film director. Maybe Coppola?

Edit: Someone below mentioned Ford, also a good pick