Who is the Greatest American Writer? Blurbing on break.
From the break room
This question presses on. You ask a hundred people and you’ll get Hemingway, Faulkner, McCarthy, Steinbeck, F. Scott, Tennessee Williams, Salinger, or some other 20th-century heavy hitting white boy. Maybe you run into a book bro who mentions Pynchon, DFW, and DeLillo. And of course, Colleen motherfucking Hoover. You throw in a few from the 19th century—Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson! Robert Frost—and you’re really rounding out the public consensus. And sure, those names carry weight. Faulkner, especially, with his dense, knotty prose that trips over itself to be understood, which is to say, I’ve never understood a word of it. Not a word. I read the Sound and the Fury cover to cover and closed it more confused than I was when I started. But people whose opinions I respect love him, so, by default, he stays.
Let’s first talk about Mark Twain. An OG, the first to paint regional vernacular with a brush fine enough to be considered art. No Tom Joad without Tom Sawyer. Twain’s a fixture at the table, and rightly so. Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, while we're here in the 19th century, both manage to grab me, despite my typical indifference to poetry. Maybe it’s because they hit on something essential, something colder and lonelier in the American psyche, that makes even me—someone who’s allergic to flowery verse—feel something. Whitman and Emerson, on the other hand, they can kick rocks on their little hikes to their pastoral fantasy lands. I’m far too cynical for Whitman’s big, exuberant ego shouting at the trees, or for Emerson’s proclamations of man’s divine spark. I’m too bitter for that. Give me black coffee, blood on the page, a loud stereo, and a little edge. Though, I’ll admit that meditation—something Emerson would have praised—has somehow found its way into my routine. Gross.
We’ve also got Melville and Hawthorne. Two geezers, imo. They’re like ghosts in the back of the room, looming over schoolchildren, Moby Dick and The Scarlet Letter in hand, punishing future generations with slog from a bygone era. Their books haunt reading lists everywhere, begging for reprieve. I really don’t have beef with either of them, but if you listen closely, you can hear the cries of ten million kids begging to have them removed from required reading. Yet, in some weird tradition, they stay.
What’s refreshing about the 18th century, though, is that our best minds were busy. Too busy shaping a brand-new country and hammering out a constitution that would ensure we weren’t bound by religious tests or kings or any nonsense about who should pray to whom. Those white boys—Franklin, Paine, Jefferson, Adams—may not have written the novels we’d want, but their nonfiction? It built something durable, something pluralistic. And for that, all is forgiven. Who needs novels when you’ve got the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom? That singular achievement remains unmatched. No one else has a document like it. The secular genius of the Philadelphia Enlightenment and the Age of Reason was, ironically, a miracle.
Yet here we are, in 2024, and MAGA Mike—a guy with a Bible worldview and beliefs that would make a paleontologist’s head spin—stands two heartbeats away from the presidency. Melancholy doesn’t quite capture Wendy Lee’s feelings sometimes. When a man who thinks humans coexisted with dinosaurs holds that much power, the despair hits really deep. Edgar Allan Poe–like in its darkness. And what do you do when that melancholy comes?in? Put on Mazzy Star and reread The Black Cat. Because Poe? He’s timeless.
Look up today and there’s Poe, still all over pop culture. The Pale Blue Eye on Netflix with Christian Bale, features Poe as a character. And The Fall of the House of Usher, another Netflix show released recently, features a modern retelling of his stories, each episode named after a tale. And don’t forget, an NFL team—one with a shot at the Super Bowl—is named after his most famous poem. In 2024, Poe looms large in America, still perched over all our shoulders like his greatest character.
It’s easier to argue influence than greatness. Poe, by that metric, is unmatched. He’s everywhere, hundreds of years after his death in a way other writers simply aren’t—whether he’s behind the curtains or in the Super Bowl. Compare that to Twain. Great as he is, there’s no Tennessee Huckleberry Finns out there playing on Sundays. Will we see Custom of the Country or Blood Meridian turned into something that grabs a modern audience a hundred years from now? I have my doubts. But the Raven?
Snobbish scholars, the literary elites, the insufferable Howard Bloom’s of the world will never crown Poe the greatest. He’s never written that sprawling American epic they crave. He didn’t have his Gravity’s Rainbow, his Infinite Jest. Sure, they are objective masterpieces, but who’s going to remember them, adapt them, in 200 years? Again, I have my doubts. Most likely, they will be trending towards forgotten, while Poe and his Raven remain perched on the Pallis, rapping and tapping at the chamber door. Nevermore!
