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

Iron & Ashes: A Measure Set in Steel

Coming soon from Monroe St. Press and John Spencer, author of the Surge Series and Last Ride On The Galena Coach Road and Other Tales:

  Iron & Ashes, a literary cycle—part epic poem, part lyric narrative, part stage play, part novel—set in late 20th century Illinois, where progress presses against memory, and shortcuts threaten to erase what still holds. 

Some roads aren't remembered. They're measured. 

Along a worn stretch of U.S. 40 near Effingham, Illinois, in the late 1970s, a scrapyard sits just off the road—ordered with a precision that borders on reverence. Nothing there is accidental. Nothing is wasted. Every piece of metal, every tool, every remnant of industry is placed, accounted for. 

The man who keeps it that way is Silas Vance. He is not a dreamer. Not a man given to abstractions. 

He is a builder. An octogenarian engineer. 

A man who has seen the great works of the world—canals cut through continents, steel raised into skylines—and who has chosen, deliberately, to step away from wealth and status into something quieter... but no less exacting. 

And yet—he is not alone. There is a presence in that yard. A witness. 

Arthur. A son who never came home from the Second World War.    

In Iron & Ashes by John Spencer, the past does not fade. It watches. It measures.

As Effingham begins to grow—pushed by the same restless force that has always driven expansion along the old roads—pressure mounts. Land is wanted. Deals are made. Corners are cut. Lines are bent. 

But some men do not bend. 

And some places do not yield without being measured first. 

In Iron & Ashes, Spencer utilizes the plumb bob as a central metaphor, representing Silas Vance's unbending moral compass. It symbolizes the conflict between individual craftsmanship and the destructive fires of progress. A Scriptural image, used by Old Testament prophets to call attention to ancient Israel's departure from the straight and true. 

 As an engineer of the old school, Vance uses his literal and metaphorical plumb line to expose crooked shortcuts, legal loopholes, and ethical compromises, and forces the town to look at what they are losing in the name of progress. 

  However, this is not a story about resisting change. It is about judging it. About whether what is built stands true... or comes up crooked. 

 Setting Iron & Ashes along U.S. 40 is also significant. Originally, this was the National Road, commissioned by Thomas Jefferson in 1806 as the first federally funded highway. It carved through the wilderness to open Illinois to pioneer settlement. Effingham grew out of the dirt along this original trail.

With the explosion of the automobile in the 20th century, it became U.S. Route 40, the "Main Street of America", lined with mom-and-pop gas stations, diners, and yards that served a traveling nation. 

 By the 1970s, however, it had been superseded by Interstate 70, which bypassed local businesses. Towns began to decline and developers stepped in to clear out the old landscape for corporate expansion, and this is the historical turning point that inspires the conflict in Iron & Ashes. 

This story, like John Spencer's other stories, demands that the reader stop and look vertically, by the steady weight of the plumb line. From the perilous freedom trails of the antebellum Surge Series, to walking the restless paths of the Galena Coach Road, or standing with Silas Vance amidst the iron and ancestral ashes of an Effingham scrapyard, the lesson remains the same. 

The road runs through it all. 

And it keeps its own account. 

Iron & Ashes—Coming Summer 2026.