Introducing Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg
(1878-1967)

Carl Sandburg was born in Illinois in 1878.  He quit school when he was thirteen to drive a milk delivery wagon to help support his family.  He also worked as a hotel porter, a brick layer, and a farm laborer.  He spent a little time at college, but didn't graduate, then got a job as a journalist for the Chicago Daily News.

Sandburg didn't write only poetry.  He also wrote history books, biographies for children and adults, novels, children's books, and film reviews!  He spent most of his life in the Upper Midwest, but eventually retired to North Carolina.

Sandburg joined the military during the Spanish-American War and was stationed in Puerto Rico, but he was never involved in a battle.  In 1908, he married Lillian Steichen, and the couple had three daughters.  Between 1916 and 1920, he published three collections of poetry while also working as a newspaperman.  The second collection, Cornhuskers, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.  He won a Pulitzer for history in 1940 for the latest volume in his children's biography of Abraham Lincoln.  In 1951, he won another Pulitzer for poetry.

In 1945, Carl and Lillian moved to a estate in the mountains of North Carolina that he named Connemara.  He lived there the rest of his life.  He supported the Civil Rights movement and was the first white man to be honored by the NAACP for his writings promoting equality and civil rights, which he began back in 1919.  He died of natural causes in 1967.

I didn't get into Carl Sandburg's poetry until fairly recently.  Oh, I'd read some of his really famous poems, but it wasn't until I visited the museum at his former home in North Carolina in 2007 that I started to really enjoy his work.  He has a lot in common with Robert Frost, so it's not surprising that I like his poetry, I suppose.