Nathanael West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust contains a character named Homer Simpson:

Except for his hands, which belonged on a piece of monumental sculpture, and his small head, he was well proportioned. His muscles were large and round and he had a full, heavy chest. Yet there was something wrong. For all his size and shape, he looked neither strong nor fertile.

In a 2012 interview with Smithsonian, Matt Groening said, “I took that name from a minor character in the novel The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West. Since Homer was my father’s name, and I thought Simpson was a funny name in that it had the word ‘simp’ in it, which is short for ‘simpleton’ — I just went with it.”