Sandburg, Carl (August)

Sandburg, Carl [August] (1878–1967),born in Galesburg, Ill., of a Swedish immigrant family, after irregular schooling, and a youth spent as an itinerant laborer throughout the Middle West, went to Puerto Rico as a soldier in the Spanish‐American War. On his return he worked his way through Lombard College in Galesburg, and after leaving (1902) became an advertising writer, journalist, and organizer for the Social Democratic party in Wisconsin. He was secretary to the socialist mayor of Milwaukee (1910–12).

His earliest poems were privately printed in a small pamphlet (1904), but he was unknown as a poet until 1914, when Poetry published a number of his short pieces, including “Chicago,” whose fearless colloquialism and vigorous free verse stimulated a critical controversy and established him as the leading figure in the Chicago group of authors that was then beginning to flourish. Chicago Poems (1916), besides its title piece, contained such vivid impressionistic poems as Fog, Grass, and Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard, and verses defining the poet's liberal social position, such as I Am the People, the Mob, and To a Contemporary Bunk Shooter. These simple, powerful utterances depicted the crude, vital American that the author knew at first hand, and that Whitman had taught him to recognize as symbolic of a free, untrammeled, democratic promised life.

His sensitive appreciation of the beauty of ordinary people and commonplace things, in which he accepted the rude and savage (Galoots) as well as the delicate and lovely (Smoke Rose Gold), was expressed with a firmer touch and greater power in the succeeding collections, Cornhuskers (1918; special Pulitzer award, 1919), Smoke and Steel (1920), Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922), and Good Morning, America (1928). These volumes included such characteristic poems as “Cool Tombs,” “Smoke and Steel,” “Broken‐Face Gargoyles,” “Prairie,” “Good Morning, America,” “Prayers of Steel,” Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind, Clean Curtains, and Losers, all of which display a combination of precise realism, born of personal experience, with playful fantasy and love of color. The People, Yes (1936) is a panoramic depiction in verse of America and the American spirit as expressed in folklore and folk history, which sums up Sandburg's profound social sympathies and his faith in the future of the working classes. His Complete Poems (1950) was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Harvest Poems, 1910–1960 (1960), Wind Song (1960), Honey and Salt (1963), and Complete Poems (1970) collect late poems.

Throughout his work there is a constant, and frequently successful, attempt to capture the distinctive flavor of the American idiom and way of thought, particularly of his native Middle West. This interest led also to his compilation of ballads and folk songs in The American Songbag (1927), and strongly influenced his original books for children, Rootabaga Stories (1922), Rootabaga Pigeons (1923), and Potato Face (1930). Besides his poetry and journalism, he devoted much time and careful research to his monumental biography of Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (2 vols., 1926) and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (4 vols., 1939, Pulitzer Prize), both abridged by the author in one volume (1954), and from which he selected a “profile” of the Civil War years titled Storm Over the Land (1942). His other prose includes The Chicago Race Riots (1919); Steichen the Photographer (1929), whose subject was the author's brother‐in‐law; Mary Lincoln, Wife and Widow (1932), written with Paul M. Angle; Home Front Memo (1943), a collection of wartime writings in verse and prose; Remembrance Rock (1948), a large, loose, poetic novel tracing an American family from its 17th‐century English origins to World War II as it develops the theme of the American Dream; and Always the Young Strangers (1953), a memoir about his youth, from which he excerpted for children a section titled Prairie‐Town Boy (1955). His Letters was published in 1968.