Chaucer was an innovative poet and a creative and witty storyteller. His very famous work, The Canterbury Tales, has influenced the English literature and taught us a lot about the people and culture of his time.

The carefully and cleverly portrayed characters of his tales are more like archetypes of the common personalities that we may encounter not only in the English society at certain time, but in any society and at any time, and because the ideas behind each tale can be related to some contemporary ideologies as well, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales can be considered a one of the most influential and everlasting literature works through the ages. Reading his very long tales are not just joyful and entertaining, but inspiring as well.

With his genius and tendency to rebel against the traditions of his society, or ridicule them at least, he would have been definitely a distinguished novelist if he lived after the genre of the novel was created.

So if Chaucer lived today, he would have been a novelist, a screenwriter, or maybe a journalist. This is mainly because he had a great sense of humour, and a deep insight on social and political issues of his time.

Fictional real life roman a clef, symbolism, and realism (with some satire) genres are what I see Chaucer the novelist would have used to write novels. I think authors like George Orwell, John Steinbeck or maybe Mark Twain are The Novelist version of Chaucer.