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Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

LINKS

http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=29

This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on Carl Sandburg including a biography, online primary texts, criticism, bibliographic information, and additional links.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/sandburg/sandburg.htm

This link connects you to the Modern American Poetry site, edited by Professor Cary Nelson at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Here you will find an exhibit of secondary criticism, bibliographic information, and external links on Carl Sandburg.

BIOGRAPHY

A native of Illinois, Carl Sandburg was born into a working-class family of Swedish immigrants. After finishing the eighth grade, Sandburg labored at a series of odd jobs before riding the rails in search of work at the age of 19. In 1998, he joined Company C of the Sixth Infantry Regiment of the Illinois Volunteers and was assigned to Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War. That same year he was admitted to Lombard College on a veteran's scholarship. After leaving Lombard in 1902, Sandburg worked as a journalist in Chicago. For five years beginning in 1907, he served as a Social-Democratic party organizer in Wisconsin, returning to journalism as a staff member for the Chicago Evening World in 1912. Two years later he emerged as a poet when Harriet Monroe published six of his poems in the Chicago-based journal Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. In 1916, Henry Holt and Company published his Chicago Poems followed by Cornhuskers two years later. The next year, he left Henry Holt and Company to publish later volumes such as Smoke and Steel (1920), Good Morning, America (1928), and The People, Yes (1936) with Harcourt, Brace & Howe. Sandburg reported on the First World War for the Newspaper Enterprise Association and became an investigative journalist for the Chicago Daily News thereafter until he covered World War Two as a syndicated columnist. In 1950, Sandburg was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his Complete Poems. He was also a collector and performer of American folk songs and published many of them in The American Songbag (1927). Moreover, he was a prolific author of children's books as well as a major biographer of Abraham Lincoln, publishing Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years in 1926, followed by a four-volume sequel, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (1939) which was awarded the Pulitzer prize for history. In 1952, Sandburg received the American Academy of Arts and Letters gold medal in BIOGRAPHY and history and a year later published his own autobiography Always the Young Strangers. In 1955 he collaborated with his brother-in-law, the photographer Edward Steichen, on The Family of Man. In 1964, Sandburg received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and his achievement as a man of American letters was celebrated by President Lyndon B. Johnson, among many others, at the Lincoln Memorial shortly after the poet's death in 1967.

SECONDARY SOURCES

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

Longo, Lucas. Carl Sandburg, Poet and Historian. Charlottesville, NY: SamHar Press, 1971.

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

Salwak, Dale. Carl Sandburg: A Reference Guide. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1998.

Sutton, William Alfred. Carl Sandburg Remembered. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1979.

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

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER