Carl
Sandburg
Carl
Sandburg, (b. Jan. 6, 1878, Galesburg,
Ill., U.S.—d. July 22, 1967, Flat Rock,
N.C.), American poet, historian,
novelist, and folklorist.
From
the age of 11, Sandburg worked in
various occupations—as a barbershop
porter, a milk truck driver, a brickyard
hand, and a harvester in the Kansas
wheat fields. When the Spanish-American
War broke out in 1898, he enlisted in
the 6th Illinois Infantry. These early
years he later described in his
autobiography Always the Young Strangers
(1953).
From
1910 to 1912 he acted as an organizer
for the Social Democratic Party and
secretary to the mayor of Milwaukee.
Moving to Chicago in 1913, he became an
editor of System, a business magazine,
and later joined the staff of the
Chicago Daily News.
In 1914
a group of his Chicago Poems appeared in
Poetry magazine (issued in book form in
1916). In his most famous poem,
“Chicago,” he depicted the city as the
laughing, lusty, heedless “Hog Butcher,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player
with Railroads and Freight Handler to
the Nation.” Sandburg’s poetry made an
instant and favourable impression. In
Whitmanesque free verse, he eulogized
workers: “Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Gary,
they make their steel with men” (Smoke
and Steel, 1920).
In Good
Morning, America (1928) Sandburg seemed
to have lost some of his faith in
democracy, but from the depths of the
Great Depression he wrote a poetic
testament to the power of the people to
go forward, The People, Yes (1936). The
folk songs he sang before delighted
audiences were issued in two
collections, The American Songbag (1927)
and New American Songbag (1950). He
wrote the popular biography Abraham
Lincoln: The Prairie Years, 2 vol.
(1926), and Abraham Lincoln: The War
Years, 4 vol. (1939; Pulitzer Prize in
history, 1940).
Another
biography, Steichen the Photographer,
the life of his famous brother-in-law,
Edward Steichen, appeared in 1929. In
1948 Sandburg published a long novel,
Remembrance Rock, which recapitulates
the American experience from Plymouth
Rock to World War II. Complete Poems
appeared in 1950. He wrote four books
for children—Rootabaga Stories (1922);
Rootabaga Pigeons (1923); Rootabaga
Country (1929); and Potato Face (1930).
