Why We Still Need the American Epic: From John Brown to the Scrap Yard

The American epic has never looked much like Homer's. 

It has seldom been about kings, rarely about emperors, and almost never about palaces.

Our epics are built beside rivers, railroads, wheat fields, factory whistles, and dirt roads. They are carried by soldiers, blacksmiths, widows, farmers, preachers, immigrants, mechanics, and ordinary people who discover that history has quietly asked something extraordinary of them. 

That is why Stephen Vincent Benét's poem John Brown's Body still matters, nearly a century after its publication. And it is why John Spencer found himself writing Iron & Ashes. 

These two works occupy different centuries. Benét, writing in the early 20th century, stood amid the 19th century Civil War. Spencer, writing in the 21st century, stands beside an aging scrap dealer still plying his trade in the late 20th century on old U.S. Route 40 in Illinois. Yet both are asking remarkably similar questions. 

What becomes of a nation after the noise of history has faded? What remains once the speeches have ended? Who remembers?

Benét answered by gathering the voices of America itself, allowing generals and laborers, abolitionists and slaves, soldiers and statesmen, mothers and children to speak in one vast chorus.  His was not merely a poem about war. It was a poem about the making—and breaking—of a people, and their re-formation into a new kind of nation. 

Iron & Ashes begins where another kind of struggle quietly unfolds. Its battlefield is not Shiloh, Antietam or Gettysburg; it is the scrapyard.  There, iron becomes memory, and rust becomes inheritance. A forgotten bearing or broken plowshare becomes evidence that ordinary labor once held communities together. 

The epic has simply changed its clothing. Where Homer sang of bronze shields, we inherit welding torches. Where Benét heard marching armies, we hear the steady rumble of diesel trucks crossing the Illinois prairie. 

Yet the questions remain the same: Who are we? What have we inherited? What are we willing to carry forward? 

Perhaps every generation must write its own epic—not because history changes, but because memory fades. 

The old roads disappear beneath interstate highways. Family farms become subdivisions. Rail depots become antique malls. Even the objects themselves vanish into the furnace. 

Someone must remember before the last traces are melted away. 

That, I believe, is the work of literature. Not merely to entertain or even to preserve facts, but to recover meaning from the ordinary. 

To look at a weathered wrench, an abandoned forge, a forgotten crossroads, or an old soldier's silence and recognize that these, too, belong within America's great story. 

The epic has never died. It simply moved from the battlefield to the back roads. 

And perhaps that is where it has always belonged.

About This Essay 

This essay also serves as the basis for a Monroe St. Press lecture and discussion program presented to libraries, historical societies, museums, civic organizations, and book clubs. The program explores the American epic tradition through the lens of Stephen Vincent Benet's John Brown's Body, John Spencer's Iron & Ashes, and the enduring relationship between literature, history, and place. 

For speaking engagements or program information, please contact Monroe St. Press via email at elaine@monroestpress.com