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- Examples such as The Cantos by Ezra Pound, Maximus by Charles Olson, The Anniad by Gwendolyn Brooks, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You by Frank Stanford, The Iovis Trilogy by Anne Waldman, and Paterson by William Carlos Williams all push and pull at the boundaries of the genre, re-envisioning the epic through the lens of modernism.
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- Br’er Rabbit. Br’er Rabbit is a character with roots in African folklore who hit the mainstream when a white man, Joel Chandler Harris, published “Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings,” a collection of stories told to him as a child by “Uncle Remus,” an elderly man who had been enslaved his entire life.
- Johnny Appleseed. Johnny Appleseed of American folklore was a bohemian eccentric who wandered the countryside in a tin-pot hat while planting apple trees.
- Molly Pitcher. Many of us remember the story about Molly Pitcher, brave wife of a Revolutionary War soldier who carried pitchers of water to men at the Battle of Monmouth in 1778.
- John Henry. The John Henry ballads that gained popularity in the 1870s tell a story of a highly skilled Black railroad worker who could drill into mountainsides faster than machines to make way for explosives used to blast open railroad paths.
- Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) I agonized over whether I should pick “Rip Van Winkle” or “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” from Irving’s oeuvre.
- Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) Poe’s early stream-of-consciousness horror story, unreliable narrator and heart beating under the floorboards and all, is certainly one of the most adapted—and even more often referenced—short stories in popular culture, and which may or may not be the source for all of the hundreds of stories in which a character is tormented by a sound only they can hear.
- Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) Once, while I was walking in Brooklyn, carrying my Bartleby tote bag, a woman in an SUV pulled over (on Atlantic Avenue, folks) to excitedly wave at me and yell “Melville!
- Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890) I will leave it to Kurt Vonnegut, who famously wrote, “I consider anybody a twerp who hasn’t read the greatest American short story, which is “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” by Ambrose Bierce.
Retellings of American folktales and legends, Native American myths, weather folklore, ghost stories and more from each of the 50 United States of America. Great for school children and teachers.
- The Iliad / The Odyssey by Homer.
- The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.
- Beowulf by Seamus Heaney (Translator)
- The Odyssey by Homer.
6 days ago · Some of the most famous and widely read classic short stories of all time are Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery (1948), Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart (1843), and Flannery O’Connor’s A ...
May 14, 2021 · From ancient Indian epics such as Mahabharata and Rāmāyaṇa to the Greek Odyssey, World History Edu present the most famous epic poems of all time. The Iliad. Homer’s Iliad, along with the Homeric poem Odyssey, is considered one of the cornerstones of the Western literature.
List of world folk-epics. World folk-epics are those epics which are not just literary masterpieces but also an integral part of the worldview of a people. They were originally oral literatures, which were later written down by either single author or several writers.
