Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois on January 6, 1878. Carl and his family lived in a three room cottage at 313 East Third Street in Galesburg, Illinois. His parent’s names were August and Clara Anderson Sandburg. Sandburg’s nickname was Charlie. His parents were both Swedish immigrants. His Dad worked for a blacksmith in Chicago. Sandburg did not have much of an education because he quit school at the age of thirteen. His favorite subject in school was geography. He started reading in elementary school, and he liked it too. His favorite stories were mostly detective stories. Some of his favorites were Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. He went to Lombard College and there his literary talents came out. Sandburg was encouraged by Phillip Green Wright, his professor. Sandburg started writing poetry at Lombard College. Sandburg had a number of jobs and worked almost his whole life. When he quit college he worked as a day laborer. While traveling as a hobo in 1897, he contrasted the difference between the rich and the poor. When he was twenty, he entered the Spanish-American war and was ordered to Puerto Rico. After

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graduation he was a newspaperman in Milwaukee. In 1907 and 1908 he was district organizer for the social Democratic party. While in Milwaukee he met a woman named Lilian Steichen. They were married in 1908 until his death on July 22, 1967. Lilian was a school teacher. During 1910-1912 he was secretary to Milwaukee’s socialist mayor. He was editorial writer for the “Daily News” in 1917. His popularity came out when “ Innumerable photographs in newspapers and magazines and animated images on television and motion picture screens had made his face as much of a popular icon as Mark Twain’s a generation earlier” (Allen 575). His peak in production was around 1930. In, 1960 he did some campaigning for John F. Kennedy in North Carolina. Carl and his wife lived in Flat Rock, North Carolina for twenty-two years. He was cremated in 1967 after his death, and his ashes were buried underneath Remembrance Rock on October 1, 1967. Remembrance Rock is located in North Carolina and is a red granite boulder. Ten years later his wife, Lilian Steichen, died and her ashes were put right beside his. Carl Sandburg mostly wrote poems about life, such as Chicago.

Sandburg wrote many novels, poems, folk songs, and a biography. His best known work is the biography of Abraham Lincoln. The biography of Lincoln is six volumes long and

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talks about his life, from birth to death. Sandburg believed in the value of life. It is said that “Sandburg’s early poetry not only tended toward excessively unshaped imitation of reality but also copied other poets as well” (Byers 461). Chicago is a book that was published in 1916. “Chicago” is also a poem which is in his book called Chicago. Cornhuskers, a book, was published in 1918 and has many of Sandburg’s great poems. Another book with great poems is Smoke and Steel, and it was published in 1920. Carruth stated that “The poetry of Carl Sandburg may have been dressed only in blue jeans, but it went everywhere and spoke in the voice of everyday people” (242). Griffith pointed out that, “In form, style and theme, many of Sandburg’s works resemble the poems in Whitman’s collection, Leaves of Grass” (108). In The American Songbag, he writes about ballads and folksongs. One embarrassment is the poem “Fog” and this poem has no meaning what so ever. In 1939 he received a Pulitzer Prize in history for his biography on Lincoln. Sandburg never won a Nobel