The Life of Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg was born to August and Clara Johnson on January 6, 1878. His parents had emigrated to America from Sweden, and lived in Galesburg, Illinois.�

Sandburg's father worked on the railroad, where he met several other men with the name "August Johnson" and decided to change the family name to "Sandburg."

At the age of thirteen, Sandburg left school to help support his family. He worked odd jobs until he was seventeen and traveled to Kansas as a hobo.�

Sandburg served eight months in Puerto Rico, fighting in the Spanish-American war. During this time sandburg met a student from Lombard College, a small school near Galesburg. The student convinced Sandburg to enroll in Lombard after returning from the war.�

At Lombard, Sandburg attracted the attention of Professor Philip Green Wright. The Professor encouraged Sandburg's writing and payed to have his first volume of poetry published. The volume was published in 1904, entitled "Reckless Ecstacy".�

After college, Sandburg moved to Milwaukee and worked as an advertising writer and newspaper reporter. It was in Milwaukee that he met Lillian Steichen, married her, and called her "Paula."

Sandburg was a socialist at the time, and acted as secretary to the first
Socialist mayor of Milwaukee from 1910 to 1912.�

Afterwards, Sandburg and his wife moved to Chicago, where he became an editorial writer for the "Chicago Daily News." During this time Sandburg published several poems in "Poetry: A Magazine of Verse."

Sandburg wrote free-verse, and was recognized as a member of the Chicago literary renaissance. In 1916�he published "Chicago Poems", which gained him much popularity. Two years later he published "Cornhuskers", and soon after "Smoke and Steel".�

Sandburg had always been interested in Abraham Lincoln and, in the early 1920s, he started writing a six-volume biography of the man. In 1932�he published "Mary Lincoln, Wife and Widow". Four years later
he published "The People, Yes" and soon after he won the Pulitzer Prize for the second part of his Lincoln biography, "Abraham Lincoln: The War Years." Carl Sandburg received another Pulitzer for his Complete Poems in 1950. He died seventeen years later, after writing many more poems.