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Carl Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois on 6th January, 1878. Sandburg's parents were Swedish immigrants and at the age of thirteen left school and found work as a labourer.

After fighting in the Spanish-American War he became a journalist and eventually was employed by the Chicago Daily News where he met another aspiring writer, Ben Hecht. His first collection of poems, Reckless Ecstasy (1904) was printed privately and was ignored by the critics.

Sandburg held left-wing political opinions and was district organizer of the Socialist Party and in 1910 became secretary to the socialist mayor of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He also contributed poems and articles to The Masses, a socialist journal edited by Floyd Dell and Max Eastman.

Sandburg's reputation as a major poet was established in 1916 with the publication of Chicago Poems. The book, with its urban themes and Sandburg's use of colloquialism, heralded a new development in American poetry. Sandburg produced several collections of poems over the next fifteen years including Cornhuskers (1918), Smoke and Steel (1920), Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922) and Good Morning, America (1928).

As well as his poetry, Sandburg is known for his six volume biography of Abraham Lincoln (1926-39). This book won a Pulitzer Prize as did his Complete Poems (1950). Other books include the novel, Remembrance Rock (1948) and his autobiography, Always the Young Strangers (1952).

Sandburg continued to write poetry and some critics believe that Honey and Salt (1963) published when the author was 85, contains some of his best work. Carl Sandburg died on 22nd July, 1967.

 

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(1) Floyd Dell wrote about discovering the work of Carl Sandburg while the literary editor of the Chicago Evening Post in his autobiography, Homecoming (1933)

I met Carl Sandburg, and he read some of his poems from manuscript. They were all impressionistic, misty, soft-outlined, delicate; I remember liking particularly the one about the fog that "comes on little cat feet". Carl Sandburg had not struck yet the note he was soon to strike in Chicago Poems.

 

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