Carl Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois, on January 6, 1878. His parents, August and Clara Johnson, had emigrated to America from the north of Sweden. After encountering several August Johnsons in his job for the railroad, the Sandburg's father renamed the family. The Sandburgs were very poor; Carl left school at the age of thirteen to work odd jobs, from laying bricks to dishwashing, to help support his family. At seventeen, he traveled west to Kansas as a hobo. He then served eight months in Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American war. While serving, Sandburg met a student at Lombard College, the small school located in Sandburg's hometown. The young man convinced Sandburg to enroll in Lombard after his return from the war.

    Sandburg worked his way through school, where he attracted the attention of Professor Philip Green Wright, who not only encouraged Sandburg's writing, but paid for the publication of his first volume of poetry, a pamphlet called Reckless Ecstasy (1904). While Sandburg attended Lombard for four years, he never received a diploma (he would later receive honorary degrees from Lombard, Knox College, and Northwestern University). After college, Sandburg moved to Milwaukee, where he worked as an advertising writer and a newspaper reporter. While there, he met and married Lillian Steichen (whom he called Paula), sister of the photographer Edward Steichen. A Socialist sympathizer at that point in his life, Sandburg then worked for the Social-Democrat Party in Wisconsin and later acted as secretary to the first Socialist mayor of Milwaukee from 1910 to 1912.

    The Sandburgs soon moved to Chicago, where Carl became an editorial writer for the Chicago Daily News. Harriet Monroe had just started Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, and began publishing Sandburg's poems, encouraging him to continue writing in the free-verse, Whitman-like style he had cultivated in college. Monroe liked the poems' homely speech, which distinguished Sandburg from his predecessors. It was during this period that Sandburg was recognized as a member of the Chicago literary renaissance, which included Ben Hecht, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and Edgar Lee Masters. He established his reputation with Chicago Poems (1916), and then Cornhuskers (1918). Soon after the publication of these volumes Sandburg wrote Smoke and Steel (1920), his first prolonged attempt to find beauty in modern industrialism. With these three volumes, Sandburg became known for his free verse poems celebrating industrial and agricultural America, American geography and landscape, and the American common people.

    In the twenties, he started some of his most ambitious projects, including his study of Abraham Lincoln. From childhood, Sandburg loved and admired the legacy of President Lincoln. For thirty years he sought out and collected material, and gradually began the writing of the six-volume definitive biography of the former president. The twenties also saw Sandburg's collections of American folklore, the ballads in The American Songbag and The New American Songbag (1950), and books for children. These later volumes contained pieces collected from brief tours across America which Sandburg took each year, playing his banjo or guitar, singing folk-songs, and reciting poems.

    In the 1930s, Sandburg continued his celebration of America with Mary Lincoln, Wife and Widow (1932), The People, Yes (1936), and the second part of his Lincoln biography, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (1939), for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He received a second Pulitzer Prize for his Complete Poems in 1950. His final volumes of verse were Harvest Poems, 1910-1960 (1960) and Honey and Salt (1963). Carl Sandburg died in 1967.

Sandburg published his most popular book in 1936, titled The People, Yes.  This book expressed Sandburg's interest in Midwestern folk expressions and speech.  It was at this time that people were beginning to compare him to Walt Whitman.

   In 1939, he published the last volume of his Abraham Lincoln literature.  He was criticized for having incorrect information presented in it but he ultimately won the Pulitzer Prize for Abraham Lincoln: The War Years.

   Seeking warmer climate, he moved to North Carolina in 1943, where he lived out the remainder of his life.  While living there, he wrote his only novel, Remembrance Rock, in 1948, where he wrote and farmed for the remainder of his life.

   Sandburg died in 1967, but before passing away, he wrote…

"It could be, in the grace of God, I shall live to be eighty-nine, as did Hokusai, and speaking my farewell to earthly scenes, I might paraphrase: 'If God had let me live five years longer I should have been a writer.'"

A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Chicago Poems (1916)
Complete Poems (1950)
Cornhuskers (1918)
Good Morning, America (1928)
Harvest Poems (1950)
Honey and Salt (1963)
In Reckless Ecstasy (1904)
Selected Poems (1926)
Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922)
Smoke and Steel (1920)
The People, Yes (1936)

Prose

Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (1926)
Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (1939)
Mary Lincoln: Wife and Widow (1932)
Steichen the Photographer (1929)
The American Songbag (1927)
The New American Songbag (1950)

CARL SANDBURG (1878-1967) wrote poetry, biography, autobiography, fiction and newspaper articles. He was a lecturer and folk-singer as well. His newspaper coverage of social unrest in 1919 resulted in a book called The Chicago Race Riots. The stories he invented for his three daughters became The Rootabaga Stories. When he was 70 he published his first and only novel, Remembrance Rock.

Sandburg won Pulitzer prizes in history and poetry. He was always trying new forms of writing and taking on new challenges. Once he wrote, "I had studied monotony. I decided whatever I died of, it would not be monotony."

CARL SANDBURG THE POET
Sandburg's poems are often full of slang and the language of ordinary Americans. Sandburg wrote poems about Chicago-- the "stormy, husky, brawling" life of the city and the lonely peace of the prairie. He wrote about real people with real problems and he wrote by his own rules.

CARL SANDBURG THE BIOGRAPHER
Sandburg wasn’t content to write only poetry. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas had debated in his hometown of Galesburg, Illinois, in October of 1858.

As a boy Sandburg knew and conversed with people who had known Lincoln. During his early career Sandburg began researching and writing about the president. The two-volume biography Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, published in 1926, did not fulfill his interest in Lincoln. He continued his research and in 1939 produced four volumes called Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in history for his Lincoln books. In 1929 Sandburg also published a biography called Steichen The Photographer of his best friend and brother-in-law, Edward Steichen.

CARL SANDBURG THE AUTOBIOGRAPHER
Sandburg’s autobiography, Always The Young Strangers, tells the story of the first 21 years of his life. He was 75 when it was published.

In his book Sandburg writes about how it was to be a child and a teenager in Galesburg. He explains why he left school after eighth grade and why, when he was 19 and restless, he became a hobo, hopping one west-bound train after another as he set out to see the country. He tells how he left home "with my hands free, no bag or bundle, wearing a black-sateen shirt, coat vest, and pants, a slouch hat" ... and "headed for the open road, a young stranger meeting many odd strangers" on his way.

CARL SANDBURG THE FOLK SINGER
Beginning in 1903, Sandburg spent a lot of time traveling around the country to lecture to school and college audiences and to the American public at large. He played the guitar and sang, read his poetry aloud, and talked about his dreams for America. Because he loved the language of the ordinary American, he collected sayings, slang and folk lore; stories and songs people shared with him in the small towns, cities, and farms he visited.

In 1927 Sandburg published one of the first collections of American folk music. It was called The American Songbag, and included 280 folk songs, many of them printed for the first time.

Sandburg’s American Songbag gives us such favorites as "Foggy, Foggy Dew," "John Henry," "Frankie and Johnny," "Ain't Goin' Study War No More" and Sandburg’s favorite, "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum."

BE READY
Be land ready
for you shall go back to land.

Be sea ready
for you have been nine-tenths water
and the salt taste shall cling to your mouth.

Be sky ready
for air, air, has been so needful to you -
you shall go back, back to the sky.
(from Wind Song, 1960)

The home where poet and author Carl Sandburg was born and its adjacent grounds containing a small park and garden are located at 331 East Third Street in Galesburg, Illinois.

Next door is the Visitor's Center staffed daily except Mondays and Tuesdays from 9 a.m until 5 p.m. -- the same hours the birthplace is open. It contains a museum, a museum shop, a small theater where several informative videos about Carl Sandburg are shown and a renovated "barn" which is actually a small theatre with a few more exhibits and where live performances are often held. The museum contains hundreds of artifacts and modern colorful displays appropriate for all ages.

The Carl Sandburg Historic Site is supported by the State of Illinois and the nonprofit Carl Sandburg Historic Site Association. The Association sponsors and participates in many activities throughout the year to honor and remember Carl Sandburg. These include the "Penny Parade" which brings schoolchildren to the site to have fun while learning about Galesburg's most famous son. The Association is a participating sponsor of the Sandburg Days Festival held in May. It hosts the Songbag Concert Series of band and folk music concerts held inside the Visitor's Center or newly renovated "garage" in the fall and winter. Details of upcoming concerts are available at the site of the series' producer, John Heasly.

The Carl Sandburg Historic Site Association planned and funded a perennial garden in the back yard. The plantings are appropriate to Sandburg's era and surround Remembrance Rock,  Sandburg died in 1967, but before passing away, he wrote…

"It could be, in the grace of God, I shall live to be eighty-nine, as did Hokusai, and speaking my farewell to earthly scenes, I might paraphrase: 'If God had let me live five years longer I should have been a writer.'"