Who Is America's Homer?(plough.com) |
Who Is America's Homer?(plough.com) |
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.
Tracy Chapman is a pretty trolly answer, but I suspect the real answer might very well be a musician or filmmaker, not a writer.
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.
Twain
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.
why?
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
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 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.
They were not written at all. No written literature existed in the time of Homer.
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.
Dare I suggest Bob Dylan?
Recommendations elaborated on in the article are a solid set. Mark Twain or Walt Whitman would probably 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)
You going to stand on your statement with that as a reference? We're closer to Pushkin than Pushkin was to Homer.
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)
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.
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 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Ingalls_Wilder#Political...
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.
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...)
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)
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.
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).