Sandburg, Carl  (1878-1967)

American poet and biographer, whose six-volume biography of President Abraham Lincoln is considered a masterful interpretation of all the available material on the subject. The son of Swedish immigrants, Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois. He left school at the age of 13 and became a day laborer. After serving in the Spanish-American War (1898), he returned to Galesburg and worked his way through Lombard (now Knox) College. In 1913 he moved to Chicago. Sandburg first gained recognition when the poem "Chicago," which appeared in the magazine Poetry in 1914, was awarded the magazine's Levinson Prize that same year. Chicago Poems (1916), in which Sandburg used unrhymed free verse and the techniques of imagism, established his reputation as a realist who was concerned with the energy and brutality of urban industrial life. Sandburg wrote editorials for the Chicago Daily News from 1918 to 1933. During this period, he wrote such volumes of poetry as Corn Huskers (1918), Smoke and Steel (1920), and Good Morning, America (1928), all of which express his faith in the common person and a basic optimism for the future of America. His poetry gained wide appreciation for its impressionistic style and colloquial vigor. Sandburg's fame as a historian rests on his monumental works Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (2 volumes, 1926) and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (4 volumes, 1939; Pulitzer Prize, 1940). Sandburg felt that previous biographies of Lincoln had tended to idealize him to the point of unreality. Sandburg also was widely known as a singer of American folk songs, many of which he collected in the printed work The American Songbag (1927). His other works include a biography of the American photographer Edward Steichen, Steichen the Photographer (1929); a collection of miscellaneous writings, Home Front Memo (1943); the novel Remembrance Rock (1948); Complete Poems (1950; Pulitzer Prize, 1951); and several children's books, including Rootabaga Stories (1922). Sandburg's autobiographies are Always the Young Strangers (1953) and the uncompleted Ever the Winds of Chance (published posthumously, 1983). His collected letters were published in 1968. His posthumously published volumes of poetry include Breathing Tokens (1978) and Billy Sunday and Other Poems (1993). revived.