SANDBURG, CARL 1878-1967

Poet

A Varied Career

Though best remembered for the poetry he wrote during the 1910s, Carl Sandburg is notable for a range of contributions to American letters, including not only poetry but also journalism and biography. A leading figure in a new group of literary talents emerging in the American Midwest, Sandburg, like a handful of his contemporaries, did not go to New York to make a name in literary circles. Instead they remained in the heartland they wrote about. Sandburg repeatedly paid homage to his roots in his work. His literary fame began with a poem named for Chicago and peaked with a biography of the great president from his home state, Abraham Lincoln.

Early Wanderings

The son of Swedish immigrants, Carl August Sandburg was born on 6 January 1878 in Galesburg, Illinois. Though his father, a blacksmith, was illiterate, his mother loved books and encouraged her three children to read. Carl Sandburg dropped out of school after the eighth grade to help support the family, and during his early teens he worked in a barbershop, cut ice, delivered newspapers, and took whatever other jobs he could find around Galesburg. According to his biographer North Callahan, these experiences gave the boy "a kind of Gothic etching of the midwest" that later would appear in his writing. At nineteen Sandburg went to Kansas to work in the wheat fields and then lived as a hobo for a few months, riding freight trains and doing odd jobs in exchange for food. In April 1898, after the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, he enlisted in the army. Though his company was sent to Cuba, they saw no action and returned to Illinois in the fall. Because of his war service, Sandburg was given free tuition at Lombard College in Galesburg, where he studied the poetry of Walt Whitman and edited the campus literary magazine. In May 1902 he dropped out of school and headed east. For two years he worked as a salesman in New Jersey, writing poetry on the side.

Journalism, Socialism, and Marriage

Returning to the Midwest in 1904, Sandburg began nearly thirty years of journalistic work, becoming involved in the Socialist Party and writing for Socialist newspapers in Milwaukee and then Chicago. He met a young party activist named Lillian Steichen, sister of the photographer Edward Steichen, and married her. Over the next decade they had three daughters. The views on the oppression of the working class that Sandburg formed during this period influenced the poetry he was writing.

Chicago Poet and Reporter

During the early 1910s Sandburg wrote his "Chicago Poems"—including "Chicago," which characterized his adopted home as "Hog Butcher for the World." The editors of The American Magazine in New York rejected them, but Harriet Monroe, editor of the Chicago-based Poetry, published nine of them in the March 1914 issue. Two years later, when these poems were included in his first collection, Chicago Poems (1916), Monroe wrote that Sandburg's verse was "as personal as his slow speech or his massive gait; always a reverent beating-out of his subject." Continuing his newspaper work, Sandburg went to Stockholm in 1918 to serve as a war correspondent for the Newspaper Enterprise Association; back in Chicago in 1919, he covered the summer race riots of that year. That same year he won the Poetry Society of America Prize for his second full-length collection of poetry, Cornhuskers (1918).

The Lincoln Biography

During the 1920s Sandburg published three more volumes of verse, but his main focus was on his biography of Abraham Lincoln. He had long been fascinated by Lincoln's life: as a young soldier traveling through Washington during the Spanish-American War, Sandburg had visited Ford's Theater, where the president had been shot; in his coverage of the Chicago race riots of 1919, he had quoted the Emancipation Proclamation. By the early 1920s Sandburg had acquired more than a thousand books about Lincoln and had begun work on a biography. The two volumes of Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (1926) were followed in 1939 by Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, in four volumes. The War Years earned Sandburg the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1940 and the Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for history and biography in 1952.

The 1930s and 1940s

During the Depression of the 1930s Sandburg published The People, Yes (1936), a long poem in which he echoed President Franklin D. Roosevelt's belief that the hope for America lay in the strength of its people. This work and the Lincoln biography were evidence of Sandburg's shift away from Socialism and toward the Democratic Party. During World War II he narrated a government movie about the war, did foreign broadcasts for the Office of War Information, and published Home Front Memo (1943), a nonfiction work praising responsibility and duty. In 1948, the year he turned seventy, Sandburg published his first work of fiction, a historical novel called Remembrance Rock. It received poor reviews, but three years later his Complete Poems (1950) won him a second Pulitzer Prize.

Final Years

Sandburg worked well into his eighties. On his seventy-fifth birthday Always the Young Strangers (1953), an autobiographical account of his childhood, was published. He was frequently asked to participate in television and radio programs about Lincoln and addressed the U.S. Congress on the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's birth. On his eighty-fifth birthday he published his last volume of poems, Honey and Salt. He died four years later, on 22 July 1967, at the North Carolina home to which he had retired in 1945.

Sources:

North Callahan, Carl Sandburg: His Life and Works (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987);

Penelope Niven, Carl Sandburg: A Biography (New York: Scribners, 1991).

Carl Sandburg

An American poet, anthologist, singer of folk songs and ballads, and biographer, Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) is best known for his magnificent biography of Abraham Lincoln and his early "realistic" verse celebrations of Chicago.

The legend of Carl Sandburg as a raw, folksy poet of midwestern democracy has overshadowed his later development. From the time he wrote his moving elegy on the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, "When Death Came April Twelve 1945," until his final volume of poetry, Honey and Salt (1963), he exhibited a newly achieved depth and originality that far surpassed his earlier work. His youthful career as an impassioned revolutionary socialist has largely been forgotten, and he died one of America's best-known and best-loved poets.

Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Ill., on Jan. 6, 1878, of a poor Swedish immigrant family. At the age of 13 he quit school to work as a day laborer. He traveled extensively through the West, where he began developing a lifelong devotion to his country and its people. Following Army service during the Spanish-American War, he entered Lombard (now Knox) College in Galesburg. Here he wrote his first poetry.

After graduation Sandburg worked as a newspaperman in Milwaukee, Wis. In 1907 and 1908 he was district organizer for the Social Democratic party in Wisconsin and served as secretary to Milwaukee's Socialist mayor (1910-1912). Later he moved to Chicago, becoming an editorial writer for the Daily News in 1917. Meanwhile his verse began appearing in the avant-garde Poetry magazine; his first volume, Chicago Poems, was published in 1916. His reputation as vital poet of the American scene was solidified with Cornhuskers (1918), Smoke and Steel (1920), and Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922).

Early Writings

Sandburg's early poetry was as close to being "subliterary" as the work of any American poet of comparable stature. Meant to illustrate his humanitarian socialist ideology, his early verse is scarcely above the level of political oratory. "I Am the People, the Mob" from the Chicago Poemsis characteristic. The ending of the poem is reminiscent of Walt Whitman at his most prosaic: "When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year, who played me for a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the world say the name: 'The People,' with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision. The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then."

Neither in use of language nor in metrics does this qualify even as free verse; in style it is closer to John Dos Passos' contemporary experiments in prose than to poetry. The revolutionary naturalistic esthetic of the time called for a poetry of direct imitation; but Sandburg's "imitations" exhibited little artistry.

Sandburg's early poetry not only tended toward excessively unshaped imitation of reality but also copied other poets as well. T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" had appeared the year before Sandburg's "Fog" was published. Eliot's image of the fog as a cat has profound implications in the context of the rest of his poem; "Fog," which was hailed as a fine example of an imagist poem, has no context whatsoever and hence no meaning. In terms of imagist poetics, "Fog" might be considered successful, but Sandburg had never counted himself a member of that movement; nor had he ever seriously considered its esthetic.

Similarly, Sandburg's "Happiness" compares unfavorably with Ezra Pound's "Salutation," and his "Buffalo Bill" expresses mere nostalgia in relation to E. E. Cummings's more penetrating "Buffalo Bill's." Some of the poems in Cornhuskers are more original and fully realized than those discussed here, but none meets the standards of the best of his contemporaries.

Later Work

From 1926 to 1939 Sandburg devoted himself primarily to writing the six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln, presenting Lincoln as the embodiment of the American spirit; he received a Pulitzer Prize in history for this work (1939). He also was collecting the folk songs that made up The American Songbook (1927).

Honey and Salt (1963), a remarkable achievement for a "part-time" poet in his 80s, contains much of Sandburg's best poetry. Here the mellowness and wisdom of age are evident; the sound of an American idiom echoes through these poems more effectively than in the earlier "realistic" verse. By this time Sandburg had moved from his dependence on ideology to a deeply felt sympathy and concern for actual people. Tenderness replaces sentimentality; emotional control replaces defensive "toughness." There is an explicitly religious consciousness in these last poems, only implicit in the earlier work, where it was often submerged in political ideology and naturalistic poetics.

Sandburg also published a collection of children's stories, Rootabaga Stories (1922). Other volumes of poetry are Good Morning, America (1928); The People, Yes (1936); Collected Poems (1950), which won a Pulitzer Prize; and Harvest Poems, 1910-1960 (1960). Remembrance Rock (1948), an epic panorama of American history, was his only novel. He died in Flat Rock, N.C., on July 22, 1967.

Further Reading

Sandburg's autobiography is Always the Young Strangers (1953). A biography is Harry L. Golden, Carl Sandburg (1961). Good critical commentary includes "Carl Sandburg's Complete Poems" in William Carlos Williams, Selected Essays (1954); Newton Arvin's "Carl Sandburg" in Malcolm Cowley, ed., After the Genteel Tradition: American Writers since 1910 (1959); Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (1961); and Hyatt H. Waggoner, American Poets: From the Puritans to the Present (1968). □

SANDBURG, CARL 1878-1967

Poet

Origins

Born on a corn-husk mattress in a three-room shack and raised in the prairie town of Galeburg, Illinois, Carl Sandberg, who early changed his name to the more American-sounding Charles Sandburg, was the restless son of semiliterate Swedish immigrants. Sandburg's name change was an early, visible sign of his desire to establish an American identity for himself and to explore the nature of Americanness: in fact, these lifelong preoccupations prepared him to become one of the foremost poetic voices of the 1930s, the decade with which he is most closely associated. Sandburg was only eighteen when wanderlust propelled him out of his rural town and toward Chicago in 1896 and then across the country as part of the stream of hoboes and tramps whose continent-wide odyssey in search of employment prefìgured that of the railroad-hopping hoboes of the Depression. Sandburg's quest left him with the indelible images he would later use in his poetry taste for adventure. During his twenties Sandburg was a college student, a soldier, a traveling salesman, a journalist for several Milwaukee and Chicago papers, and an apprentice poet, who recorded his observations and his first attempts at verse in a series of journals. He published his first book of poetry, In Reckless Ecstasy, in 1904. He became active in Socialist politics, campaigning for Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Debs in 1908, working as the secretary for the Socialist mayor of Milwaukee from 1910 to 1912, and writing Socialist pamphlets. When in 1907 Sandburg met Lillian Steichen, the sister of photographer Edward Steichen, his life changed dramatically. After a brief, primarily epistolary correspondence, the two married: she persuaded him to take back his given name and to try to integrate his American self and his immigrant Swedish self.

Growing Reputation

The publication of a group of Sandburg's poems in Harriet Monroe's magazine Poetry in 1914 signaled the emergence of a major American talent. The expectations of critics were met, if not exceeded, by the two books which followed, Chicago Poems in 1916 and Cornhuskers in 1918. In 1921 Sherwood Anderson declared Sandburg to be "of all the poets in America … my poet," and the following year Malcolm Cowley acclaimed him: "Sandburg writes American like a foreign language, like a language freshly acquired in which each word has a new and fascinating meaning." Cowley's praise echoed throughout the following decades, as writers struggled to reconcile the emphasis on language of the Imagist and modernist techniques with the American identity that was theirs. Sandburg, it seemed to many, was the poet best equipped for this sometimes daunting task. His accessible language, his populist concerns, and his graceful tone made him a favorite of audiences, though his reputation among critics had its ups and downs. As Newton Arvin wrote in The New Republic in 1936, "Of tenderness, of human feeling, of generous and robust sentiment, there is notoriously a great deal: of strong, sharp and ardent emotion, of the specific passion and intensity of poetry, there is singularly little." However, Sandburg's simplicity and optimism struck a chord for readers beaten down by the Depression, readers who found their experiences affirmed by the voice of the poet whose 1936 volume The People, Yes was a popular success. As Henry Steele Commager wrote, "Sandburg is the poet of the plain people, of farmers and steel workers and coal miners, of the housewife and the stenographer, and the streetwalker, too; of children at play and at work; of hoboes and bums; of soldiers—the privates, not the officers—of Negroes as of whites, of immigrants as of natives—of The People, Yes."

Biography

Even as Sandburg was building his reputation with such volumes as Smoke and Steel (1920) and Good Morning, America (1928), he was becoming known for his monumental biography of Abraham Lincoln, the first two volumes of which appeared in 1926 under the title Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the final four volumes of which were published in 1939 as Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. The biography as a whole, which may have been occasionally inaccurate in detail but which was carefully researched and vividly written, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1940. Sandburg wrote other biographies, including Steichen the Photographer (1929) and Mary Lincoln: Wife and Widow (1932), as well as an autobiography, Always the Young Strangers (1953).

Continuing Success

As time passed, Sandburg's reputation flourished. His thousand-page novel Remembrance Rock appeared in 1948: he collected a brace of honorary degrees from universities and a handful of prizes, including the Swedish Order of the North Star in 1938, a Pulitzer Prize for poetry (1951), and a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. In 1962 he was designated poet laureate of Illinois. Together, these prizes recognized his ethnic roots, his regionalism, and above all his distinctively American voice—fitting tributes for a man who favored, as he wrote, "simple poems published long ago which continue to have an appeal for simple people."

Sources:

Harold Bloom, ed., Twentieth-century American Literature (New York: Chelsea House, 1987);

Dorothy Nyren Curley, Maurice Kramer, and Elaine Fialka Kramer, eds., Modern American Literature : A Library of Literary Criticism (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1969);

Penelope Niven, Carl Sandburg: A Biography (New York: Scribners, 1991).

Carl Sandburg

Born: January 6, 1878
Galesburg, Illinois
Died: July 22, 1967
Flat Rock, North Carolina
American poet, biographer, and singer

An American poet, singer of folk songs and ballads, and biographer, Carl Sandburg is best known for his biography of Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) and his early verse celebrations of Chicago, Illinois.

Son of Swedish immigrants

Carl August Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois, on January 6, 1878, the second of August Sandburg and Clara Mathilda Anderson's seven children. His parents had both come to the United States from Sweden; his father worked as a blacksmith's assistant. Sandburg liked to read and decided at age six that he wanted to be a writer, but he left school after finishing eighth grade to work at a series of jobs. Sandburg was brought up in a largely Republican household, but events such as the local railway workers' strikes and the Chicago Haymarket riots of 1886 got him interested in social justice.

Sandburg traveled extensively through the West, where he began developing a love of the country and its people. Following eight months of service in the army, Sandburg entered Lombard (now Knox) College in Galesburg. There he wrote his first poetry and was encouraged by Professor Philip Green Wright, who privately published several volumes of his poems and essays.

Early writings

Sandburg left Lombard without graduating and eventually moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where in 1907 and 1908 he was district organizer for the Social Democratic Party in the state. In 1907 he met Lilian Steichen, a schoolteacher, and they were married in 1908. From 1910 to 1912 Sandburg served as secretary to Milwaukee's Socialist (believing in collective ownership of the means of producing goods and services) mayor Emil Seidel. Later he moved to Chicago, becoming an editorial writer for the Daily News in 1917. Meanwhile his verse began appearing in Poetry magazine; Chicago Poems was published in 1916. He made his reputation as a poet of the American scene with Cornhuskers (1918), Smoke and Steel (1920), and Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922).

Sandburg's early writings dealt with his belief in social justice and equality and were written in such a way that they barely resembled what most people thought of as poetry. "I Am the People, the Mob" from the Chicago Poems is an example. The ending of the poem is similar to the style of Walt Whitman (1819–1892): "When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year, who played me for a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the world say the name: 'The People,' with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision [ridicule]. The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then."

Sandburg's early poetry not only tended toward unshaped imitation of real life but also copied other poets as well. Sandburg's "Happiness" is somewhat similar to Ezra Pound's (1885–1972) "Salutation," and Sandburg's "Fog" was compared to T. S. Eliot's (1888–1965) "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which had appeared the year before "Fog" was published. Seventy-three previously uncollected Sandburg poems from the 1910s can be found in Poems for the People (1999).

Later work

From 1926 to 1939 Sandburg devoted himself mainly to writing the six-volume biography of President Abraham Lincoln, presenting Lincoln as a symbol of the American spirit; Sandburg received a Pulitzer Prize in history for this work (1939). He also collected the folk songs that made up The American Songbook (1927).

Honey and Salt (1963), a remarkable achievement for a "part-time" poet in his eighties, contains much of Sandburg's best poetry. Here the mellowness and wisdom of age are evident, and the poems are more effective than his earlier verse. By this time Sandburg had developed and begun to express a deeply felt sympathy and concern for actual people. Tenderness replaces sentimentality; controlled feelings replace defensive "toughness." There is also a religious element in these last poems that does not appear in Sandburg's earlier work.

Sandburg also collected folk songs and toured the country singing his favorites. He published a collection of these songs, called The American Songbag. Other Sandburg works include a collection of children's stories, Rootabaga Stories (1922); Good Morning, America (1928); The People, Yes (1936); Collected Poems (1950), which won a Pulitzer Prize; and Harvest Poems, 1910–1960 (1960). Remembrance Rock (1948), a sweeping view of American history, was his only novel. Sandburg died in Flat Rock, North Carolina, on July 22, 1967.

For More Information

Golden, Harry L. Carl Sandburg. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1961. Reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Meltzer, Milton. Carl Sandburg: A Biography. Brookfield, CT: Twenty-First Century Books, 1999.

Niven, Penelope. Carl Sandburg: A Biography. New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1991.

Yannella, Philip R. The Other Carl Sandburg. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996.

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.

Carl Sandburg 1878–1967, American poet and biographer, b. Galesburg, Ill. The son of poor Swedish immigrants, he left school at the age of 13 and became a day laborer. He served in the Spanish-American War and, after returning to Galesburg, attended Lombard College (now Knox College). In 1902 he went to work as a newspaperman in Milwaukee. In 1908 he married Lillian Steichen, sister of the photographer Edward Steichen. From 1910 to 1912 he was secretary to the Socialist mayor of Milwaukee. Sandburg later moved to Chicago, where he continued his journalism career, becoming in 1917 an editorial writer for the Chicago Daily News. His poetry first began to attract attention in Harriet Monroe's magazine Poetry. With the appearance of his Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), Smoke and Steel (1920), and Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922), his reputation was established. Among his later volumes of verse are Good Morning, America (1928), The People, Yes (1936), Complete Poems (1950; Pulitzer Prize), Harvest Poems, 1910–1960 (1960), and Honey and Salt (1963). Sandburg drew most of his inspiration from American history and was profoundly influenced by Walt Whitman. His verse is vigorous and impressionistic, written without regard for conventional meter and form, in language both simple and noble. Much of his poetry celebrates the beauty of ordinary people and things. Sandburg's most ambitious work was his six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln (1926–39); this monumental work exalts Lincoln as the symbol and embodiment of the American spirit. The last four volumes won the Pulitzer Prize. At 70, Sandburg produced his first work of fiction, the novel Remembrance Rock (1948), a panoramic epic of America. His other works include The American Songbag (1927), a collection of folk ballads and songs; children's books, such as Rootabaga Stories (1922); and the autobiographical Always the Young Strangers (1953).

Bibliography: See his letters, ed. by H. Mitgang (1968); biographies by N. Callahan (1970) and H. Golden (1988); studies by R. Crowder (1963), H. B. Durnell (1965), and W. A. Sutton (1979).

Sandburg, Carl August (1878–1967), American poet, who challenged contemporary taste by his use of colloquialism and free verse. He published Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), Smoke and Steel (1920), Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922), Good Morning America (1928), and Complete Poems (1950). His other works include The American Songbag (1927; folk songs); a monumental life of Abraham Lincoln (6 vols, 1926–39); his novel Remembrance Rock (1948); and Always the Young Strangers (1953), an autobiography.

Sandburg, Carl (1878–1967) US poet and biographer. Strongly influenced by Walt Whitman, his first volume of poetry was Chicago Poems (1916). Other collections include Cornhuskers (Pulitzer Prize, 1918), Smoke and Steel (1920), Good Morning, America (1928), and The People, Yes (1936). He also won Pulitzer Prizes for his Complete Poems (1950), and for the biography Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (1939).