Carl August Sandburg (January 6, 1878 – July 22, 1967) was an American poet, biographer, journalist, and editor. He won threePulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography ofAbraham Lincoln. During his lifetime, Sandburg was widely regarded as "a major figure in contemporary literature", especially for volumes of his collected verse, includingChicago Poems (1916),Cornhuskers (1918), andSmoke and Steel (1920).[2] He enjoyed "unrivaled appeal as a poet in his day, perhaps because the breadth of his experiences connected him with so many strands of American life".[3] When he died in 1967, PresidentLyndon B. Johnson observed that "Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America."[4]
Carl Sandburg was born in a three-room cottage at 313 East Third Street inGalesburg, Illinois, to Clara Mathilda (née Anderson) and August Sandberg,[1] both ofSwedish ancestry.[5] He adopted the nickname "Charles" or “Charlie” in elementary school and, along with his two oldest siblings, changed the spelling of the family name to "Sandburg".[1][6][7]
At the age of thirteen, Sandburg left school and began driving amilk wagon. Between approximately ages fourteen and seventeen or eighteen, he worked as a porter at the Union Hotel barbershop in Galesburg.[8] He later returned to the milk route for eighteen months before working as a bricklayer and a farm laborer on the wheat plains ofKansas.[9]
After a period atLombard College in Galesburg,[10] Sandburg worked in various jobs, including as a hotel servant inDenver and a coal-heaver inOmaha, Nebraska. He began his writing career as a journalist for theChicago Daily News and went on to write poetry, history, biographies, novels, children’s literature, and film reviews. He also collected and edited books of ballads and folklore. Sandburg lived primarily inIllinois,Wisconsin, andMichigan before moving toNorth Carolina.
During theSpanish–American War, Sandburg volunteered for military service and was stationed inPuerto Rico with the 6th Illinois Infantry,[11] landing atGuánica on July 25, 1898, though he did not see combat. He attended theUnited States Military Academy inWest Point, New York for two weeks but left after failing mathematics and grammar examinations. He returned to Galesburg and entered Lombard College, leaving without a degree in 1903.
Sandburg subsequently moved toMilwaukee,Wisconsin, where he worked for a newspaper and joined the Wisconsin Social Democratic Party, affiliated with theSocialist Party of America. Sandburg served as secretary toEmil Seidel, Milwaukee’s socialist mayor from 1910 to 1912. Sandburg later stated that his experiences in Milwaukee were formative for his life and work.[12]
In 1907, Sandburg met Lilian Steichen (1883–1977), sister of photographerEdward Steichen, at the Milwaukee Social Democratic Party office. They married the following year and had three daughters. Their first daughter, Margaret, was born in 1911. The family later lived inHarbert, Michigan; theRavenswood neighborhood of Chicago; and then inMaywood, Illinois.[12][13] From 1919 to 1930, they resided at 331 South York Street inElmhurst, Illinois.
During his years living in Chicago's western suburbs, Sandburg published several major works, includingChicago Poems (1916),Cornhuskers (1918), andSmoke and Steel (1920).[2] He received aPulitzer Prize in 1919, funded by a special grant from thePoetry Societyof America, forCornhuskers.[14] He also wrote three children’s books—Rootabaga Stories (1922),Rootabaga Pigeons (1923), andPotato Face (1930)—as well asAbraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (1926),The American Songbag (1927), andGood Morning, America (1928). The Elmhurst home was later demolished; the site is now a parking lot.
On February 12, 1959, during the 150th anniversary ofAbraham Lincoln’s birth, Sandburg delivered an address before a joint session of Congress following actorFredric March’s reading of theGettysburg Address.[17] Sandburg supported thecivil rights movement and received theNAACP Silver Plaque Award in recognition of his contributions to civil rights.[18]
Sandburg died ofnatural causes in 1967 and his body was cremated. The ashes were interred under "Remembrance Rock", a granite boulder located behind his birth house in Galesburg.[19][note 2]
Much of Carl Sandburg's poetry, such as "Chicago", focused onChicago, Illinois, where he spent time as a reporter for theChicago Daily News andThe Day Book. His most famous description of the city is as "Hog Butcher for the World/Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat/Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler,/Stormy, Husky, Brawling, City of the Big Shoulders."
Sandburg earnedPulitzer Prizes for his collectionThe Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg,Corn Huskers, and for his biography ofAbraham Lincoln (Abraham Lincoln: The War Years).[15] Sandburg is also remembered by generations of children for hisRootabaga Stories andRootabaga Pigeons, a series of whimsical, sometimes melancholy stories he originally created for his own daughters.The Rootabaga Stories were born of Sandburg's desire for "American fairy tales" to match American childhood. He felt that the European stories involving royalty and knights were inappropriate, and so populated his stories with skyscrapers, trains, corn fairies and the "Five Marvelous Pretzels".
In 1919, Sandburg was assigned by his editor at theDaily News to do a series of reports on the working classes and tensions among whites andAfrican Americans. The impetus for these reports were race riots that had broken out in other American cities. Ultimately,major riots broke out in Chicago too, but much of Sandburg's writing on the issues before the riots caused him to be seen as having a prophetic voice. A visiting philanthropist,Joel Spingarn, who was also an official of theNational Association for the Advancement of Colored People, read Sandburg's columns with interest and asked to publish them, asThe Chicago Race Riots, July, 1919.[20][21]
Sandburg's popular multivolume biographyAbraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, 2 vols. (1926) andAbraham Lincoln: The War Years, 4 vols. (1939) are collectively "the best-selling, most widely read, and most influential book[s] about Lincoln."[22] The books have been through many editions, including a one-volume edition in 1954 prepared by Sandburg.
The books garnered critical praise and attention for Sandburg, including the 1940Pulitzer Prize for History for the four-volumeThe War Years. But Sandburg's works on Lincoln also received substantial criticism.William E. Barton, who had published a Lincoln biography in 1925, wrote that Sandburg's book "is not history, is not even biography" because of its lack of original research and uncritical use of evidence, but Barton nevertheless thought it was "real literature and a delightful and important contribution to the ever-lengthening shelf of really good books about Lincoln."[24] HistorianMilo Milton Quaife criticized Sandburg for not documenting his sources and questioned the accuracy ofThe Prairie Years, noting they contain a number of factual errors.[22] Others have complainedThe Prairie Years andThe War Years contain too much material that is neither biography nor history, saying the books are instead "sentimental poeticizing" by Sandburg.[22] Sandburg himself may have viewed his works more as an American epic than as a mere biography, a view also mirrored by other reviewers.[22]
Sandburg's 1927 anthology theAmerican Songbag enjoyed enormous popularity, going through 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 the second folk revival movements (of the 1940s and 1960s, respectively).[25] According to the musicologistJudith Tick:
As a populist poet, Sandburg bestowed a powerful dignity on what the '20s called the "American scene" in a book he called a "ragbag of stripes and streaks of color from nearly all ends of the earth ... rich with the diversity of the United States." Reviewed widely in journals ranging from theNew Masses toModern Music, theAmerican Songbag influenced a number of musicians. Pete Seeger, who calls it a "landmark", saw it "almost as soon as it came out." The composer Elie Siegmeister took it to Paris with him in 1927, and he and his wife Hannah "were always singing these songs. That was home. That was where we belonged."[26]
Sandburg said he considered working onD. W. Griffith'sIntolerance (1916), but his first film work was when he signed on to work on the production ofThe Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) in July 1960 for a year, receiving an "in creative association with Carl Sandburg" credit on the film.[27]
Carl Sandburg's boyhood home in Galesburg is now operated by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency as theCarl Sandburg State Historic Site. The site contains the cottage Sandburg was born in, a modern visitor center, and small garden with a large stone called Remembrance Rock, under which his and his wife's ashes are buried.[28] Sandburg's home of 22 years inFlat Rock, Henderson County, North Carolina, is preserved by theNational Park Service as theCarl Sandburg Home National Historic Site.Carl Sandburg College is located in Sandburg's birthplace ofGalesburg, Illinois. During the Spanish-American War, Sandburg was stationed at Camp Alger in Fairfax County, Virginia and so the county has both a Sandburg Road near the spot where the camp was located and a Carl Sandburg Middle School.
On January 6, 1978, the 100th anniversary of his birth, theUnited States Postal Service issued acommemorative stamp honoring Sandburg. The spare design consists of a profile originally drawn by his friendWilliam A. Smith in 1952, along with Sandburg's own distinctive autograph.[29]
Carl Sandburg Village was a 1960s urban renewal project in theNear North Side, Chicago. Financed by the city, it is located between Clark and LaSalle St. between Division Street and North Ave. Solomon & Cordwell, architects. In 1979, Carl Sandburg Village was converted to condominium ownership.
Numerous schools are named for Sandburg throughout the United States, and he was present at some of these schools' dedications. (Some years after attending the 1954 dedication ofCarl Sandburg High School inOrland Park, Illinois, Sandburg returned for an unannounced visit; the school's principal at first mistook him for ahobo.)[citation needed]Sandburg Halls, a student residence hall at theUniversity of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, carries a plaque commemorating Sandburg's roles as an organizer for the Social Democratic Party and as personal secretary toEmil Seidel, Milwaukee's first Socialist mayor.
Carl Sandburg Library opened inLivonia, Michigan, in 1961. The name was recommended by the Library Commission as an example of an American author representing the best of literature of the Midwest. Carl Sandburg had taught at theUniversity of Michigan for a time.[34]
Galesburg openedSandburg Mall in 1975, named in honor of Sandburg.
In 2000, the Chicago Public Library Foundation created the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, given annually to "an acclaimed author whose work has enhanced the public’s awareness of the written word."[36][37]
Carl Sandburg began his political involvement as an organizer for the Social Democratic Party of Wisconsin, affiliated with the Socialist Party of America, and served as secretary to Milwaukee’s socialist mayor Emil Seidel from 1910 to 1912. Initially a committedsocialist, he left the Socialist Party in 1917 due to disagreements with its opposition to U.S. participation inWorld War I, instead supporting President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to enter the conflict.[38]
Although Sandburg continued to hold some socialist sympathies—such as voting for Socialist Party candidateEugene V. Debs in the1920United States presidential election—he later described himself as a "radical independent". During the 1920s, his political views moved to the right, and he developed a strong interest in Abraham Lincoln, whose life and leadership became central themes in his work. This interest culminated in his publication ofAbraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (1926) andAbraham Lincoln: The War Years (1939). His study of Lincoln reflected an increasing alignment withliberalism.[39]
In the 1930s, Sandburg’s political orientation shifted toward theDemocratic Party. He supported PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt and theNew Deal, drawing parallels between Roosevelt’s policies and Lincoln’s leadership during the Civil War. Sandburg publicly expressed his support for New Deal programs such asSocial Security and federal employment initiatives through his writings and public appearances.[40][41]
By the 1950s, Sandburg endorsed Democratic presidential candidateAdlai StevensonII in the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections, participating in campaign activities and publicly commending Stevenson’s platform.[42] In 1960, he supportedJohn F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, speaking at rallies and expressing approval of Kennedy’sNew Frontier program, which he viewed as a continuation of Roosevelt’s legacy.[43]
Sandburg's "Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come" fromThe People, Yes was a slogan of the German peace movement ("Stell dir vor, es ist Krieg, und keiner geht hin"); however, it is often falsely attributed toBertolt Brecht.[44]
Daniel Steven Crafts'The Song and The Slogan is an orchestral composition built around recited passages from Sandburg's "Prairie".
InJonathan Lethem's novelDissident Gardens the main character Rose Zimmer became anAbraham Lincoln devotee after reading Sandburg's biography. Her copy of the six volumes became the centerpiece of her shrine to Lincoln.
Sufjan Stevens's "Come on! Feel the Illinoise! Part I: The World's Columbian Exposition Part II: Carl Sandburg Visits Me in a Dream" (fromIllinois).
ComposerPhyllis Zimmerman set Sandburg's poems to music in her choral compositionFog, which was recorded and produced on CD.[47]
In 2016, composer and conductorMichael Tilson Thomas premiered his musical theater pieceFour Preludes on Playthings of the Wind based on the Sandburg poem from the collectionSmoke and Steel, for three singers, chamber orchestra and bar band.
The Letters of Carl Sandburg (1968) (autobiographical/correspondence) (edited by Herbert Mitgang)
Breathing Tokens (poetry by Sandburg, edited by Margaret Sandburg) (1978) (poetry)
Ever the Winds of Chance (1983) (autobiography) (started by Sandburg, completed by Margaret Sandburg and George Hendrick)
Carl Sandburg at the Movies: a poet in the silent era, 1920–1927 (1985) (selections of his reviews of silent movies; collected and edited by Dale Fetherling and Doug Fetherling)
Billy Sunday and other poems (1993) (edited with an introduction by George Hendrick and Willene Hendrick)
Poems for Children Nowhere Near Old Enough to Vote (1999) (compiled and with an introduction by George and Willene Hendrick)
Poems for the People. (1999) 73 newfound poems from his early years in Chicago, edited with an introduction by George Hendrick and Willene Hendrick
Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years (2007) (illustrated edition with an introduction by Alan Axelrod)
^ThePulitzer Prize for Poetry was inaugurated in 1922 but the organization now considers the first winners to be three recipients of 1918 and 1919 special awards.
^His wife and two daughters would also be interred there. See the signage.
^abcSandburg, Carl (1953).Always the Young Strangers. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. pp. 29, 39. Sandburg's father's last name was originally "Danielson" or "Sturm". He could read but not write, and he accepted whatever spelling other people used. The young Carl, sister Mary, and brother Mart changed the spelling to "Sandburg" when in elementary school.
^Sandburg in 1953 was not able to recall his younger self's reasons, but he relates that being able to correctly pronounce "ch" was a mark of assimilation among Swedish immigrants.
^ab"Carl Sandburg House"(PDF). City of Chicago Department of Planning and Development, Landmarks Division. October 4, 2006.Archived(PDF) from the original on 2022-10-09. RetrievedAugust 28, 2019.
^ab"Poetry". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved November 24, 2013.
