biography

Carl Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois in 1878 near the tracks of the Quincy Railroad to a working class family. Sandburg's father, a Swedish immigrant, worked as a blacksmith for the railroad. August Sandburg met Carl's mother, also a Swedish immigrant, when she was working as a hotel chambermaid in a town his railroad gang passed through. August was literate in neither Swedish nor English, but Clara was literate in both. Sandburg attended school until eighth grade, at which time he dropped out to help his father support the family. In Always the Young Strangers , Carl Sandburg writes of his education, "In those years as a boy in that prairie town I got education in scraps and pieces of many kinds, not knowing that they were part of my education. I met people in Galesburg who were puzzling to me, and later when I read Shakespeare I found those same people were puzzling him. I met little wonders of many kinds among animals and plants that never lost their wonder for me, and I later found that these same wonders had a deep interest for Emerson, Thoreau, and Walt Whitman." During this time, Sandburg worked a variety of odd jobs, including delivering milk, cutting ice on the lake, assisting carpenters, painters, plumbers, barbers, druggists etc. When he was eighteen, he decided that he wanted to see the country and embarked on a journey traveling as a hobo to the wheat fields on Kansas. He rode freight trains and stopped to work short-term jobs when he needed money. After the Maine was sunk in1898, Sandburg, along with millions of other young men, enlisted in the army. In this way, he saw Guantanamo Bay, Guanica, and Puerto Rico. This experience in the army gave Sandburg a entry ticket to Lombard College in Galesburg upon his return. Here, he met Professor Phillip Green Wright, who led Sandburg to discover his literary inclinations. Wright took interest in Sandburg and helped him publish his first few volumes of poetry. After his student career (he never graduated,) he supported himself by peddling stereoptican pictures, serving as editor of the Lyceumite and giving lectures onWalt Whitman. He lent his literary talent to the Socialist Party for a brief stint, resulting in his meeting Lilian Steichen, a schoolteacher who had been employed by the party to translate socialist documents. The two were married in 1908. Sandburg campaigned for Eugene Debs for the presidency, but quit the socialist party at the advent of WWI. However, he continued to be active in politics, campaigning for Roosevelt and the New Deal. Sandburg wrote his Chicago Poems, a series of vignettes describing the lives of the people of Chicago in 1914-1916. These poems attracted the attention of Harriet Monroe, and they were published in her Poetry magazine in 1914. The poems received mixed reviews, ranging from vehement hatred to adoring praise. "The Harbor" was one of these poems. The Chicago Poems are often considered to be the peak of Sandburg's life. After this collection, Sandburg published Cornhuskers, Smoke and Steel , and a volume of children's stories written for his daughters, The Rootabaga Stories. In searching for an modern icon that gave voice the the people, Sandburg rediscovered Abraham Lincoln and began a biography of him entitled The Prairie Years. He followed this up with a more accurate, less sentimental latter half of the biography, The War Years. The wall street crash of 1929 and the Great Depression pushed Sandburg to write a something to reassert his faith in the working classes and the common people. To this end, he wrote The People, Yes, an amalgam of American mythology written in an extremely colloquial voice. Carl Sandburg continued to write for the rest of his life, though none of his later works are considered equals of what he produced in the early 20th century. In a preface to his complete poems, Sandburg writes, "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.'" Sandburg died in 1967, at the age of 89, and was celebrated as one of America's greatest and most prolific writers.








http://www.wirz.de/music/sandbfrm.htm
http://www.ralphmag.org/newU.html
http://www.nndb.com/people/845/000031752/