The Greeks had the Iliad. Rome had the Aeneid. England had Beowulf and Paradise Lost, France had Roland, Spain El Cid.
Great civilizations tell heroic stories about themselves. So what is the Great American Epic?
This question was the subject of one of my tweets last week and drew considerable interest - so much so that I found myself wanting to answer the question definitively in a longer format.
I got a lot of thoughtful feedback, which is what the purpose of these lists is - to make you think about literature, remember old stories, and get suggestions for the next life-changing read.
So what is the great American epic? Is it Moby Dick? Lonesome Dove? Huck Finn, Leaves of Grass, Gone With The Wind, The Leatherstocking Tales? The McDonald’s Dollar Menu?
I’m going to pick one, because anything less would be a copout.
Meet your contenders
Here’s the list of contenders ranked by popularity in the thread: (calculated off likes and mentions)
Moby Dick
Book of Mormon
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Blood Meridian
Shelby Foote’s Civil War Trilogy
Lonesome Dove
Little House on the Prarie
Leatherstocking Tales (Last of the Mohicans, The Deerslayer, The Pathfinder, The Prarie)
Honorable Mentions: Marvel Universe, Star Wars, John Carter, East of Eden, Great Gatsby, Leaves of Grass, Absalom, Absalom, Grapes of Wrath, Gone With The Wind
Dishonorable Mentions: The McDonalds Menu, The Movie Heat From 1995, Avatar
So what exactly is an epic?
Turns out, this is a complex subject. Aristotle defined epic poetry as dignified verse about serious actions. This brings us to the first problem - almost none of the suggestions were in verse.
I’m fine with ignoring cranky old Aristotle from time to time, but the fact remains that all the older epics in my post are in verse.
This is a function of genre - before the first novels appeared in the 1700’s, there were two types of extended narrative - epic and romance. Neither genre had to rhyme - in fact, most epics are in non-rhyming blank verse - but they were still in verse.
This would disqualify all of the suggestions outside Leaves of Grass and Paul Revere’s Ride. Both are great poems, but neither is a serious contender for the title, the former because of its individual focus, and the latter because of it’s briefness.
But America still needs an epic. The world’s leading superpower and promulgator of civilization and culture must have some story it tells itself about what America is. So what to do?
I’m going to unilaterally strike this verse requirement - the reality is that America is a young country that came of age after the ascendance of prose.
If Aristotle's definition is too strict, how to define an epic? C.S. Lewis, in his 100+ page “Preface to Paradise Lost (1942)” makes a distinction between primary and secondary epic, noting that the former is uncritically accepting of martial deeds, while the latter is a product of a more advanced and conflicted society that comprehends the tragedy of arms. Both however, are examples of the “loftiest and gravest” type of poetry.
With that sort of vagueness, perhaps a textbook definition would help. The Renaissance, part of the Bloomsbury Guides to English Literature says an epic is “A narrative of heroic actions, often with a principal hero, usually mythical in its content, offering inspiration and ennoblement within a particular cultural or national tradition.”
Note the “often” and “usually.” Apparently, there is a lot of wiggle room in defining an epic.
For simplicity, I’ll combine Aristotle, Lewis and the textbook into a simpler set of three primary criteria. An epic is:
A 1) serious work telling a 2) heroic story that 3) shapes a great civilization.
If you reverse engineer the works that we unquestionably acknowledge as epics, it fits. This is a great description of Homer’s Illiad, but not the more personal didactic poems of his contemporary Hesiod. It’s a great description of Milton’s Paradise Lost, but not of the Canterbury Tales.
The reality is that literary genres are fluid, and the categorization of a work as a romance or a comedy instead of an epic is as much a question of history as it is of theory. That doesn’t dissuade me from looking for the American epic for one important reason - nations need epics. A civilization cannot maintain greatness without belief in its own story.
Epics are primarily civilizational dramas, not stories of individual expression. Epics are heroic, not satirical or ironic. They form the backbone of the story that a civilization tells about itself.
America is an undeniably great nation, but it is also a nation divided - and that makes it all the more important to understand and tell our own story to ourselves. What story do we want to tell about ourselves?
The Top Contenders:
Moby Dick
Moby Dick is an undeniably serious work of American literature. As one commenter put it:
Here’s the problem. If this is the story that we tell ourselves about our civilization, we are the definition of self-loathing.
Moby Dick is a tragedy, a warning, a cautionary tale. Captain Ahab is obsessed, vengeful, brooding. He is less the American archetype than a dark outlier.
When he says: “They think me mad—Starbuck does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer” do we think of America? Do we really believe that this represents our story as a young and budding superpower? Does our story end in tragic horror? Are the things we strive for empty and ever-receding?
Maybe you believe this. If so, you aren’t going to build a great civilization. You may be the next prophet Isaiah. You may even be right, but you aren’t propounding a heroic vision.
The Book of Mormon
This one got a surprising number of votes. I’ll be honest. I’m not a fan of the suggestion, because I’m not a Mormon. This isn’t prejudice, but an issue of classification.
You might say that I’m not giving the book its due in a literary sense, and you might be right. I can’t say I’ve spent a lot of time studying the Book of Mormon, although I re-read much of it before writing this. It’s certainly a serious work telling a heroic story that shaped a civilization.
The disqualifier for me is the civilization it shaped was not the broader American one but rather the sectional society of Mormonism and later, the political entities that flowed from it (Deseret and the later Utah territory) Mormonism has become a thriving and influential religious grouping in America, but it is still exclusive. Non-Mormon parts of American civilization are not represented in the epic.
The Book of Mormon is not the American epic. It did not form the basis for American civilization, but rather, it formed that of the Mormon religion and its practitioners. Now, if you want to call it the epic of Deseret, then you’ll probably find few objections.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
I’ve talked before about my belief that this is the Great American Novel. It was actually my first suggestion in the thread as an American epic. The book is full of identifiably American types that sprawl across the landscape of the antebellum South and West. It’s more Odyssey than Illiad, but initially, seems like a contender.
But applying our definition (a serious work telling a heroic story that shapes a great civilization) you quickly run into trouble. Huck Finn is hardly a serious work in tone, but it does deal with serious topics, and humor is a basic characteristic of Americans. So I’ll give it a pass on that.
It’s the second criterion - heroic story - that really hurts Huck Finn. Epic literature isn’t ironic, satirical, or cynical, but Huck Finn most certainly is. Mark Twain was a great American writer, but if you read Huck Finn as a narrative of what America is, you see an ignorant, hateful, fraudulent nation of cheap carnival barkers and church ladies.
If you had to sum up the point of Huck Finn, you could do worse than this quote: “Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain't that a big enough majority in any town?”
It’s not a heroic tale.
Now if you think that’s what America is at its core, then you might be right, but you aren’t building a heroic myth. Ironic detachment isn’t an epic pose. Skewering the follies of your countrymen is the stuff of great comic novels, not epics.
Blood Meridian
I was a little surprised at the popularity of this suggestion, and I have to come clean - I think Cormac McCarthy’s prose can be a little bit purple. Tacky. Overdrawn in a self-serious rather than satirical way. Yes, it is sometimes profound. But if you shoot for profundity and miss it 6 times out of 10, it can grow old quickly.
Now McCarthy isn’t the only purple prose offender on this list (looking at you, Fenimore Cooper). But he did have the benefit of an extra 150 years to clean it up. He should know better. How many times can you describe a sunrise as blood-colored?
T.S. Eliot (“a critic should have no emotions except those immediately provoked by a work of art”) might disapprove, but I loathed Blood Meridian.
Not because it was bleak, but because it was often pompous. The Judge is a comic book villain. The cruelty is often Tarantino-esque. But what does it signify? And where is the understatement that characterizes the classic American man of action? The monologues go on and on. Yes, it is great literature. Yes, it is a classic. But flawed doesn’t begin to describe it.
FWIW, McCarthy’s style films well, especially in the hands of directors and actors who have a tiny bit of understanding of the value of understatement in their repertoire. But without the film version of “No Country For Old Men,” would McCarthy be considered a living legend?
In any case, Blood Meridian isn’t a heroic tale. The judge is the literal incarnation of the devil and you can’t get more anti-hero than that.
The Civil War Trilogy by Shelby Foote
I last read this trilogy in my teens, and I wasn’t thinking about epic narrative styles then - I was simply carried away by Foote’s storytelling. This is history of course, but it’s also narrative, and mythology, and imagination.
Foote tells the story of our nation’s most defining years like Homer told the story of the war with Troy - there’s no doubt that this is a very strong contender based on style.
It’s a serious work that tells a heroic story about who were are as Americans.
The only fly in the ointment is whether it shaped American civilization. Foote’s masterpiece wasn’t completed until the 1970’s. It didn’t rise to popular prominence until the Ken Burn’s documentaries of the 1990’s. It may simply have come along too late to be a factor in determining and shaping American’s self-conception.
And with the recent cancelation of Foote for being insufficiently woke, his trilogy seems to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. With a period of influence only lasting a decade or two, it’s hard to argue that it shaped or was foundational to American civilization.
Lonesome Dove
I love, love, love this book. But while a much less cynical story than Blood Merdian, it’s still hard to accept McMurty’s vision of America as a heroic one. It strives for realism, not heroism.
Like the Civil War trilogy, it also may have come along too late. Lonesome Dove is a great piece of writing, and its essentially ambiguous view of western culture is surely influential in modern western literature and movies, but to say it shaped American civilization is a stretch.
Little House on the Prairie
Laura Ingalls Wilder was no Homer, Twain, or Melville. So the “serious work” criterion is automatically going to be a problem.
LHOTP is an immensely heroic tale of mythic proportions. I am still in awe of Pa and Ma Ingalls and their adventures across the wide swath of the American frontier, battling Indians, blizzards, locusts, drought and the land itself.
It’s the quintessential American story - the intrepid pioneers versus the frontier. (Looking back at Moby Dick, the frontrunner, it’s easy to say that Captain Ahab’s obsession is an allegory for the grasping American desire for manifest destiny. But hunting whales isn’t quite the most important story in American history. In contrast, LHOTP is in the thick of the American drama.)
Did LHOTP shape American civilization? The books were published in the 1930’s and 1940’s, and have proved immensely popular and enduring. Much of what modern Americans know about pioneer days comes from Wilder’s stories, either in book form or from the popular TV show. And a large part of the mental space in our culture when it comes to pioneers and the frontier is a product of these books. But still, their impact has been confined to 20th and 21st-century Americans. An epic doesn’t have to come at the very beginning of a culture. But it often does.
LHOTP is a contender, but it’s also essentially children’s literature. Great children’s literature, but still, is it serious enough to be placed next to the Odyssey or Aeneid?
If only there was a serious, ground-breaking work that covered the same mythology of frontier expansion and influenced American culture in foundational ways…
This brings us to my pick for the Great American Epic:
AND THE WINNER IS: The Leatherstocking Tales (Last of the Mohicans, The Deerslayer, The Pioneers, The Pathfinder, The Prairie)
The author of the Leatherstocking Tales was James Fenimore Cooper, America’s first great novelist, a man born in the 1700’s, an inspiration to Melville, Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others. Cooper put American letters on the map, but more importantly, he did it while highlighting a particularly American story - the story of the frontier.
Cooper’s career masterpiece was his Leatherstocking Tales, a loose collection of novels about the quintessential American frontiersman, Hawkeye, a long, lean, frontiersman with a gentle heart and a unerring aim. The series includes The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pioneers, The Pathfinder and The Prairie.
The hero of the Leatherstocking Tales, Hawkeye, is a frontiersman “six feet in his moccasins” “light and slender, showing muscles” with an expression of “guileless truth, sustained by an earnestness of purpose.” Here then, is the prototypical long lean American with guns of steel and an honest heart. It’s a type that has influenced many American heroes in pop culture, from the Lone Ranger to Fess Parker’s Davy Crockett to Marvel’s Captain America.
Hawkeye is joined by the second great hero of the saga, Chingachgook, a Mohican chief, “noble, tall, handsome and athletic” endowed with a “grave dignity” and courtesy. The two men face perils and trials together and apart throughout the stories, forming a bond that transcends race and tribe, and signifies the ideal relationship that Cooper sought to frame for Americans and native peoples.
Cooper’s work is undoubtedly serious, and although his style has been criticized (particularly cruelly by Mark Twain) it is a fine product of the romantic period in which Cooper wrote. If it lacks realism, it also possesses the power to engage the imagination. The enduring popularity of Last of the Mohicans, which has been adapted multiple times for film, isn’t accidental. As novels, the Leatherstocking Tales don’t rise to the level of Moby Dick or Huck Finn, but they are still serious art on a heroic subject.
Cooper himself, under the heady influence of Byron, whom he quotes constantly in prefaces, called the works romances, not an epic. But with the passage of centuries and the unfolding of a frontier that was still largely unsettled in Cooper’s time, it’s not unfair to say they’ve been transmuted into a more serious and nation-defining genre.
Written between 1823 and 1841, the novels were immensely popular at a time when the frontier was still a very real place. Cooper influenced generations of writing about the frontier, from Zane Grey to Tolstoy, but perhaps more importantly, he influenced people who were actually pushing the frontier west.
Cooper wrote about manifest destiny, the fragile beauty of the environment, and the sadness of the closing of the frontier. He also wrote with compassion about the native peoples and the end of their way of life, a perspective that continues to influence our view of the frontier today. (Sometimes, this lack of realism was frustrating, or even dangerous - I was particularly struck by a comment of Fanny Kelly, one of the victims of the Great Sioux uprising in 1862. As her friends were killed around her, she could not square such horror with her romantic reading about the “brave generosity” of the “noble” native American “enshrined in poetic beauty.”)
Cooper helped to shape the westward-facing civilization of frontier settlers that formed the America we know today. His tales are of heroes, both settlers and Indians, who struggle in the ultimate American theatre - the woods and prairies of the frontier.
While the Leatherstocking Tales aren’t the best literature on the list of candidates, they meet all the criteria of “a serious work telling a heroic story that shapes a great civilization.” Beyond this, they are a classic that I can confidently recommend to every American to understand where our conception of self comes from.
Why don’t we understand epics?
One of the things that struck me about the conversation sparked by my tweet is the lack of heroic belief in ourselves that is endemic to modern culture.
America is a young country, and implicit in the search for an American epic is the fear that we’ve come too late to have our own. And in a sense, I think we have - not because there are no good candidates, but because as moderns, we can no longer believe in true heroes.
Valor and heroism, particularly in war, are the prerequisites for epic literature. A society that is cynical, critical, and ironic will pick anti-heroes as representatives.
We moderns pick at the wounds of the past, deconstructing, debunking, killing our heroes and believing the worst of ourselves. How else can you explain the proposal that (as in Blood Meridian) the story of America is the story of the Devil himself?
This isn’t about what is true about America. It is about what we believe. Modern Americans may believe that the American story is a savage, sordid vacuum of despair, bloodlust and grasping. They may or may not be right.
But this is not what the men and women who made this country believed. Cynicism is a modern specialty and as C.S Lewis noted, epic poetry has “a quality that moderns find hard to understand.”
At the time Fenimore Cooper wrote the Last of the Mohicans, the United States population numbered just under 10 million in 23 states. Westward expansion beyond the Mississippi was almost non-existent. America was a backwater and had just been humiliated by Britain and France in the quasi-war and the war of 1812.
Something beyond cynicism inspired John Fremont, Kit Carson, Marcus Whitman, Jedediah Smith, James Beckwourth, and thousands of others to push West and make a new life. It propelled people like the Ingalls family across the plains. We may sneer at the myth of Manifest Destiny or the romance of the frontier, but to our national forebears, it was no myth. It shaped our civilization. So too, the sense of America as a bastion of liberty and a new thing in political history allowed Abraham Lincoln to inspire a nation in the Gettysburg Address by appealing to its sense of itself and its heroic history.
Modernity has its advantages - no longer blinded by the ethos of heroism, we can engage in introspective self-critique that leads to more empathy - at least that’s the hope. Michael O’Connell comments in his essay “Epic and Romance” that “the social and political world of [non-primary epic poets] has become too complex for a martial ethos to be accepted simply and uncritically,” an observative that certainly describes the modern world.
But one has to wonder if a certain amount of belief in our national greatness is necessary. A complete lack of self-esteem is damaging to the individual, as is a complete attitude of self-criticism. Is not the same true of a nation?
In the end…
The search for the Great American Epic reveals something about us that this critical age may find hard to hear.
Aristotle said the superiority of poetry over history consists in its possessing a higher truth and a higher seriousness. Epic poetry, the most serious form, shows us the way to discovering the high truth of who we are as a civilization.
Critical theory takes us only so far. In the end, we must have a heroic story.
Great summary! Time to read some Cooper.
Great post! I actually think Tom Sawyer is a strong candidate on the positive side and sort of complements (and perhaps should be read together with) Huck Finn whose darkness is misunderstood by those privileged people who think that the “American Story” is always negative.