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May 23, 2006
The Great Ones
I'm trying to put together a serious list of the greatest Americans of the 20th century. In particular, I am trying to get my own strange sort of handle on the cream of that crop whose dramatic arc (or at least the public phase of their dramatic arc) occurred mainly in that weird, exciting and mean century (as opposed to people like me, who still actively plague mankind in the 21st century). My first approximation to such a list (in alphabetical order):
Ansel Adams
Woody Allen (Not dead, but Annie Hall and other classics belong to the 20th century)
Fatty Arbuckle
Arthur Ashe
James Beard
John Belushi
Herb Brooks (and if you had to look to see who he was, I hereby revoke your American citizenship)
Johnny Cash
The Collyer Brothers (for their contribution to 20th century urban weirdness)
Adrian Cronauer
John Dillinger
John Moses Browning (A holdover from the 19th century, his guns help define the 20th; I swear by his m1911 design)
Truman Capote
Julia Child
John Coltrane
John Denver (he wrote the soundtrack for the Aspen ski scene in the Seventies)
Charles and Ray Eames
Dale Earnhardt (Hey, he defined America for a whole sub-set of our population)
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Stephen Jay Gould
Spalding Gray
Shizuo Kakutani (Not quite American, he nonethless wiggled his way into our hearts by limning a fixed-point theorem or two)
Andy Kaufman
Donald Knuth
Cosmo Kramer
Dean Martin
William Maxwell Gaines (founder of Mad magazine)
Hugh Hefner
Patricia Highsmith
The entire 1972-73 New York Knicks
Larry, Darryl and Darryl (I couldn't leave them off after including Bob Newhart)
Pistol Pete Maravich
Dean Martin
Steve McQueen (The greatest Steve of all.)
Robert Mondavi (who will never actually die, but nonetheless must be assigned to some century)
Bob Newhart
Jack Nicklaus
George Patton
George Plimpton
Oscar Robertson
Paul Simon
Dean Smith
Hunter Thompson
John Wooden
Frank Lloyd Wright
Thoughts?
Posted by dag at May 23, 2006 7:25 PM
Comments
What about the Mitchell Brothers? They were basically the fathers of modern pornography, and the impact of adding that to our culture can not be overlooked...
Posted by: The Good Rabbi at May 29, 2006 9:42 PM