Carl Sandburg

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Carl August Sandburg (January 6, 1878 – July 22, 1967) was an American poet, biographer, reporter, and editor.

He received three Pulitzer Awards, one for his poetry and another for his biography of Abraham Lincoln.

Sandburg was widely regarded as "a central figure in contemporary literature" during his lifetime, particularly for the number of his collected verse, including Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), and Smoke and Steel (1920).

President Lyndon B. Johnson wrote that "Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America," and that he enjoyed his "unrivaled fame as a poet in his day, perhaps because the breadth of his experiences connected him with so many strands of American life.

He was America.

Life

Carl Sandburg was born in a three-room cottage on 313 East Third Street in Galesburg, Illinois, to Clara Mathilda (née Anderson) and August Sandberg, both of Swedish ancestry. He and his two oldest siblings changed the spelling of their last name to "Sandburg" in elementary school at the same time.

He left school and began pulling a milk wagon at the age of thirteen. He worked as a porter at the Union Hotel barbershop in Galesburg from the age of fourteen to eighteen. After that, he was back on the milk route for 18 months. On the wheat plains of Kansas, he became a bricklayer and a farm laborer. He began as a student at Lombard College in Galesburg, then became a hotel servant in Denver and later a coal-heaver in Omaha. He began writing for the Chicago Daily News as a reporter. He later wrote poetry, history, biographies, books, children's literature, and film reviews. Sandburg has also collected and edited books on ballads and folklore. He spent the majority of his life in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan before moving to North Carolina.

Sandburg volunteered to serve in the military during the Spanish-American War and was stationed in Puerto Rico with the 6th Illinois Infantry, disembarking at Guánica, Puerto Rico, on July 25, 1898. Sandburg was never really called to battle. He attended West Point for only two weeks before failing a math and grammar exam. Sandburg returned to Galesburg and enrolled Lombard College, but did not graduate with a degree in 1903. He went to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to work for a newspaper and later joined the Wisconsin Social Democratic Party, which is also the name by which the Socialist Party of America was identified in the state. Sandburg served as a secretary to Emil Seidel, Milwaukee's socialist mayor from 1910 to 1912. Carl Sandburg later stated that Milwaukee was where he got his feet and that the remainder of his life had been "the unrolling of a scene that began in Wisconsin."

Sandburg met Lilian Steichen (1883-1977) at the Milwaukee Social Democratic Party office in 1907, and the two married in Milwaukee the next year. Edward Steichen, Lilian's brother, was a photographer. Sandburg and his mother, Paula, raised three children. Margaret, the family's first child, was born in 1911. After being offered a Chicago newspaper, the Sandburgs moved to Harbert, Michigan, and then to suburban Chicago, Illinois, 1912. They lived in Evanston, Illinois, before settling at 331 South York Street in Elmhurst, Illinois, from 1919 to 1930. Sandburg wrote Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), and Smoke and Steel (1920). Sandburg's collection Cornhuskers was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1919 "made possible by a special grant from The Poetry Society." Sandburg also published three children's books in Elmhurst: Roots from 1922, Rootabaga Pigeons (1923), and Potato Face (1930). In 1926, Sandburg published Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, a two-volume biography, as well as a book of poems titled Good Morning, America (1928), in Elmhurst. The Sandburg house on 331 South York Street in Elmhurst has been demolished, and the building is now a parking lot. In 1930, the family immigrated to Michigan.

Sandburg received the second Pulitzer Prize for History in 1940 for his four-volume The War Years, the Abraham Lincoln's sequel to his Lincoln, and his second Poetry Pulitzer in 1951 for Complete Poems.

In 1945, he moved to Connemara, a 246-acre (100 ha) rural estate in Flat Rock, North Carolina. Here he made less than half of his total published work and lived with his wife, daughters, and two grandchildren.

In honor of Abraham Lincoln's birth's 150th anniversary, Congress held a joint session on February 12, 1959, with actor Fredric March giving a moving reading of the Gettysburg Address followed by an address by Sandburg.

Sandburg was the first white man to be honoured by the NAACP as a "great prophet of civil rights in our time."

Sandburg died of natural causes in 1967 and his body was cremated. The ashes were laid to rest under "Remembrance Rock," a granite boulder found behind his birth house in Galesburg.

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Career

Carl Sandburg's poetry, such as "Chicago," concentrated on Chicago, Illinois, where he worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and The Day Book. His most popular description of the area is "Hog Butcher for the World/Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat/Player with railroads, and the Country's Freight Handler, Man of the Big Shoulders."

Sandburg received Pulitzer Prizes for his book The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, Corn Huskers, and his biography of Abraham Lincoln (Abraham Lincoln: The War Years). Sandburg is also remembered by generations of children for his Sandabaga Stories and Rootabaga Pigeons, a collection of fanciful, sometimes melancholy tales he created for his own children. Sandburg's desire for "American fairy tales" to match American childhoods spawned the Rootabaga Stories. He thought that the European stories concerning royalty and knights were unnecessary, and so filled his stories with skyscrapers, trains, corn fairies, and the "Five Marvelous Pretzels."

Sandburg was asked by his editor at the Daily News to write a series of studies on the working classes and tensions among whites and African Americans in 1919. These were riots that had broken out in other American cities, which had caused the impetus for these articles. Ultimately, major protests in Chicago broke out, but Sandburg's writing on the topic prior to the riots led him to believe he had a prophetic voice. Joel Spingarn, a visiting philanthropist who served as a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, read Sandburg's columns with admiration and demanded to publish them. The Chicago Race Riots, 1919.

Abraham Lincoln, Sandburg's classic multivolume biography. 2 vols. (1926) and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, 4 vols. (39) are collectively "the best-selling, most widely distributed, and most influential book[s] about Lincoln." The books have appeared in many versions, including a one-volume version that Sandburg produced in 1954.

Sandburg's Lincoln scholarship had a major influence on Lincoln's popular image. Robert E. Sherwood's books were adapted for his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938) and David Wolper's six-part dramatization for television, Sandburg's Lincoln (1974). In May 1957, he recorded excerpts from his biography and some of Lincoln's talks for Caedmon Records in New York City. In 1959, he was named for Best Achievement – Documentary Or Spoken Word (Other Than Comedy) for his recording of Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait with the New York Philharmonic. According to some historians, more Americans learned about Lincoln from Sandburg than from any other source.

Sandburg's four-volume The War Years earned critical praise and admiration, including the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for History. However, Sandburg's Lincoln's Lincoln work was also highly criticized. Sandburg's book "is not history" because of a lack of original research and uncritical use of evidence, according to Barton, but "real literature" and "a delightful and important contribution to the ever-lengthening shelf of really good Lincoln books. Milo Milton Quaife chastised Sandburg for failing to record his sources and doubted The Prairie Years' accuracy, noting that they contain a variety of factual errors. Some have expressed dissatisfaction with the book's contents, saying that the books are instead "sentimental poeticizing" by Sandburg. Sandburg's works may have been more a masterpiece than a mere biography, as seen by other reviewers.

Sandburg's 1927 anthology The American Songbag gained a following in many editions; and Sandburg himself was perhaps the first American urban folk singer, accompanying himself on solo guitar at lectures and poetry recitals; and in recordings, long before the first or second folk revival movements (of the 1940s and 1960s respectively). Judith Tick, a musicologist, wrote this article: Judith Tick is a musicologist.

Sandburg said he considered filming on D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), but the first film role he did on was in July 1960, receiving a "in creative collaboration with Carl Sandburg."

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