Carl Sandburg

Carl August Sandburg was an American poet, biographer, journalist, and editor whose life stretched from January 6, 1878, to July 22, 1967. Born in a three-room cottage in Galesburg, Illinois, to Clara Mathilda Anderson Sandberg and August Sandberg, both of Swedish ancestry, he grew up close to the work and movement of ordinary American life. In elementary school he adopted the nickname “Charles” or “Charlie,” and he and his two oldest siblings changed the family name to Sandburg. By thirteen he had left school. Soon he was driving a milk wagon, working as a porter in a barbershop, laying brick, and laboring on the wheat plains of Kansas.

Those early years gave Sandburg the breadth that later made his writing feel so widely shared. After a period at Lombard College in Galesburg, he worked as a hotel servant in Denver and a coal-heaver in Omaha. During the Spanish-American War, he volunteered for military service and was stationed in Puerto Rico with the 6th Illinois Infantry, though he did not see combat. He briefly attended the United States Military Academy at West Point, but left after failing mathematics and grammar examinations. Returning to Galesburg, he entered Lombard College again and left without a degree in 1903.

Sandburg began his writing career as a journalist for the Chicago Daily News, and went on to write poetry, history, biographies, novels, children’s literature, film reviews, and collections of ballads and folklore. His years in Milwaukee mattered deeply to him. There he worked for a newspaper, joined the Wisconsin Social Democratic Party, and served as secretary to Emil Seidel, Milwaukee’s socialist mayor, from 1910 to 1912. Sandburg later said his Milwaukee experiences were formative for his life and work. In 1907 he met Lilian Steichen at the Milwaukee Social Democratic Party office. They married the next year and had three daughters.

Sandburg became especially associated with poems rooted in Chicago, where he reported for the Chicago Daily News and The Day Book. His volumes Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), and Smoke and Steel (1920) helped make him a major figure in contemporary literature during his lifetime. He won three Pulitzer Prizes: one in 1919 for Cornhuskers, one in 1940 for Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, and one in 1951 for Complete Poems. His multivolume Lincoln biography, beginning with Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years in 1926 and continuing with The War Years in 1939, became among the best-selling and most widely read books about Lincoln.

He also wrote for children, creating Rootabaga Stories and Rootabaga Pigeons from a wish to give American childhood its own fairy tales, filled not with royalty and knights but with skyscrapers, trains, corn fairies, and the “Five Marvelous Pretzels.” In 1919, his reporting on working classes and racial tensions in Chicago led to The Chicago Race Riots, July, 1919. Later, he supported the civil rights movement and received the NAACP Silver Plaque Award. In 1945 he settled with his family at Connemara in Flat Rock, North Carolina, where he produced much of his later writing.

When Sandburg died in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson said, “Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America.” The words fit because Sandburg wrote from many kinds of contact: labor, newsrooms, politics, family stories, songs, cities, and the long memory of Lincoln. His own warning, “Be careful with your words. Once they are said, they can only be forgiven, not forgotten,” suits a writer who spent his life listening to how Americans speak, work, argue, remember, and hope.