Tracy Chapman is a pretty trolly answer, but I suspect the real answer might very well be a musician or filmmaker, not a writer.
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
Recency bias? Why not Jimmy Stewart? Gregory Peck? Humphrey Bogart? Paul Newman, Robert Redford?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Adams_(miniseries)
And will be playing and producing Dodd.
https://variety.com/2019/film/news/joe-wright-in-the-garden-...
Theme of his oevre is not-so-immortal American heroes and heroism through and through
Except for Redford, the others don't have their own voice
Although most popular knowledge about him revolves around his earlier acting career (Westerns, Dirty Harry), you'll notice a distinct change in many of his films once he started directing.
* Play Misty for Me
* Breezy
* Unforgiven
* A Perfect World
* The Bridges of Madison County
* Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
* Mystic River
* Million Dollar Baby
* Changeling
* Gran Torino
* American Sniper
* Sully
* The Mule
Letters from Iwo Jima
Flags of our Fathers.
He certainly took me by surprise by the depth of his offerings, given that I used to know him as blondie with no name and for dirty harry.
But he has also been an OST composer for some films.
But as a director, they could be elevated to the status of creator, and perhaps directing is the truer American art form rather than ...epic poetry or the novel. Which speaks to the core of the question at a different level.
Besides, Homer didn't write his own plots either, he adapted original screenplays, so to speak!
Kubrick made all his iconic movies (except Spartacus and Paths of Glory) while settled in Britain, and shot most of them in British studios.
Walter Disney, obviously.
Well, it will probably take at least another century for the fact to hit.
Walt Disney is overwhelmingly about older stories (Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty), and not anything I feel distinctly "American".
The most popular and timeless properties out of Disney (ex: Mickey Mouse) aren't really telling stories or setting cultural trends IMO. Meanwhile, Superman and Spiderman (Okay, I know Stan Lee only partially had influence on Spiderman...) are closer to what people see as distinctly "American".
But yeah, Jack Kirby would be closer than the other two.
Maybe Epic Rap Battles of History has the answer:
it's not like he had anything to do with superman
Seriously doubt it.
Both "how Americans see themselves and how people around the world sees them" was established way before both the MCU and before superhero comics became anything else than a preoccupation of the nerdy niche.
In the 60s, and 70s, and 80s, few fucks were given around the world for the Marvel comic universe (they still sold somewhat, just not that important culturally), and it was definitely not how people got to perceive the US: hollywood, the western, rock n' roll, all those were 100x more important. And Disney was way more important than Marvel at the time too.
Moana? Sleeping Beauty? Mickey Mouse?
The only major "American identity" film I can think of was Princess and the Frog. Maybe Big Hero 6 (at least the San Francisco half).
-----------
The others are correct in that Mark Twain is probably the real answer. But I'm thinking of a modern media (film, comic books, etc. etc).
Maybe Wicked and Wizard of Oz counts as two sides of American culture. A push and counter push.
--------
Sleeping Beauty? That's French. Beauty and the Beast? Also French.
Great Mouse Detective? British. Alice in Wonderland? British.
Pinocchio? Italian.
Yes, Sleeping Beauty, et al were originally from "not the US" countries, very few people outside those countries remembers that. Instead, they're Disney, or at least US.
Basil of Baker Street (Great Mouse Detective) literally saves the Queen of England.
Robin Hood and The Sword in the Stone are also similarly very, very British. No one can possibly confuse the issue.
All of them. None of those MCU movies really did anything to the "american psyche", forgettable entertainment.
And even if they had done, the question was "in terms of how Americans see themselves and how people around the world sees us". Nobody sees Americans in in 2026 the way Stan Lee or MCU saw them. Not even themselves. How they have been seen in general wasn't determined in 2026 or 2020 or 2000, but in the 20th century. And even how they're seen and see themselves in 2026 is not defined by the MCU either.
Concerning the general view on US, Disney movies (especially including Pixar) have had much more influence. But I mentioned other even more important things: Hollywood in general (pre-MCU, from early film to John Ford, and to Copolla and Scorsese), the western and the idea of the west/'frontier', rock n' roll...
>Sleeping Beauty? That's French. Beauty and the Beast? Also French. Great Mouse Detective? British. Alice in Wonderland? British. Pinocchio? Italian.
In their Disney treatment they're 100% American.
Questioning authority and mythology is very American.
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.
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.
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.
Twain
Aside, I do find it amusing when I go read old sf, like the ship who sang, and they mention"dylanists" as a serious movement
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.
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.
"He [Mark Twain] also said 'There once was a man named [N-word] Jim,' so not everything he said was perfectly amazing" -Louis CK
The one exception is Jim who everybody just casually dismisses, yet he's the one truly good hearted and upstanding character in the entire book. It's a lesson about the difference between what people pretend to be like, and what they are really like. Which makes the critiques of the book, often focusing on pejoratives towards Jim, just so unbelievably ironic. It's the deterioration of thinking in society.
Sure but you have to read the book first to know that, whereas the reader gets slapped in the face right away with the racial slur while reading the book for the first time, which is why some schools don't read Twain. This thread is about why people might not pick him to be the "America's Homer", I'm not trying to say anything more than that.
"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."
Poe seems like an obvious candidate no one listed.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Twain wasn't a poet. The article specifies right at the start that it's looking for a great American poet.
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.