Carl Sandburg's Life
Penelope Niven
Sandburg, Carl (6 Jan. 1878-22 July 1967), sonneteer, writer, and folk musician, was born Carl August Sandburg delicate Galesburg, Illinois, the son of August Sandburg, a railroad blacksmith's helper, and Clara Mathilda Anderson. His parents were hardworking Norse immigrants who had met when August Sandburg was working adorned the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad in Galesburg and Clara Mathilda Anderson, who had traveled on her own to representation new world, was employed as a hotel maid in Discoverer, Illinois. The frugal couple instilled in their seven children rendering necessity of hard work and education, as well as a reverence for the American dream. When Carl Sandburg entered have control over grade, he Americanized his Swedish name, thereafter signing his secondary papers and his early work as a poet, orator, impressive journalist "Charles A. Sandburg."
Officially ending his public school schooling after eighth grade, Sandburg worked in his hometown shining situation, delivering milk and newspapers, and performing other odd jobs. His thirst for travel and adventure, supported by a railroad authorization borrowed from his father, led in 1896 to his leading significant journey, a trip to Chicago, the city he ulterior covered as a reporter and celebrated as a poet. Thorough 1897 Sandburg became one of thousands of American hoboes put away atop and inside railroad boxcars, working their way western by train through Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado replace search of jobs.
After a few months Sandburg returned return to Galesburg for a brief, restless stint as a housepainter already enlisting in Company C of the Sixth Infantry Regiment personage the Illinois Volunteers for service in the Spanish-American War. Loosen up was assigned to duty in Puerto Rico from July until late August 1898. In October 1898, although he lacked a high school diploma, Sandburg's status as a war veteran suitable him for admission with free tuition to Lombard College increase twofold his hometown. He also received a conditional appointment to interpretation U.S. Military Academy in 1899. He traveled to West Impact to take the entrance examinations but failed the required arithmetic and grammar tests. He returned to Galesburg to study soughtafter Lombard until May 1902.
He left college without a quotient but with a new appetite for reading and writing verse, encouraged by his first significant mentor, economist and poet Prince Green Wright, a Lombard professor who later taught at University. An amateur publisher, Wright used a small handpress in his cellar to produce four leaflets by Charles A. Sandburg: In Reckless Ecstasy (1904), Incidentals (1907), The Plaint of a Rose (1908), and Joseffy (1910), a promotional profile commissioned by a popular magician and inventor. The other three booklets contained small essays, aphorisms, and poems after the fashion of Sandburg's deary writers at that time: Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Browning, and Elbert Hubbard.
Chronically infected with itchy feet, Sandburg roamed the country after his departure from college, activity himself by selling Underwood and Underwood stereoscopic pictures and bighearted an occasional lecture on Whitman, George Bernard Shaw, or Ibrahim Lincoln. When he ran out of money, he hopped a freight train and "rode the rods," a feat that evaluate him stranded for ten days in the Allegheny County Reformatory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1902 because he could not remunerate the requisite train fare.
From 1902 through late 1907 Writer wrote for minor journals in Chicago and tried to set a career on the Lyceum and traveling Chautauqua lecture circuits, specializing in orations on Whitman, Lincoln, Shaw, and the ideals of socialism. Emblazoned on the 1907 advertisement for his address on Walt Whitman titled "An American Vagabond" were the explicate "Books are but empty nothings compared with living, pulsing men and women. Life is stranger and greater than anything ingenious written about it."
His fiery intensity as an orator won the attention of Wisconsin Social-Democratic party leader Winfield P. Gaylord, who recruited Sandburg to become a party organizer. From 1907 until 1912 Sandburg campaigned vigorously throughout Wisconsin for social ism, writing for newspapers and journals, organizing workers, making stump speeches, and in 1910 serving as secretary to Emil Seidel, depiction first socialist mayor of Milwaukee. At Social-Democratic party headquarters infant Milwaukee in December 1907 Sandburg met Lilian Steichen, a grassy Socialist and schoolteacher, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of interpretation University of Chicago (1904), and the younger sister of catamount and photographer Eduard Steichen (later Edward Steichen), who had already won wide recognition in New York and Paris.
During representation first six months of 1908, Lilian Steichen and Charles Author corresponded, he from the outposts of Wisconsin and she steer clear of Princeton, Illinois, where she was teaching. They fell in attraction and were married in 1908 in Milwaukee. They had triad children. Because his wife encouraged Sandburg to reclaim his christened name, he became once and for all Carl Sandburg.
In his spare time during the Milwaukee years, Sandburg wrote poems replete with such rugged, unorthodox free verse and such unconventionally realistic subject matter that he himself could not even nominate sure they were poetry. He continually experimented with poetic carveds figure of the working men, women, and children whose harrowing disagreements he confronted daily in the Milwaukee municipal office. Always description passionate advocate of social justice and equality, Sandburg gradually became disenchanted with Social-Democratic party politics in Milwaukee because of representation ever-widening gap between reality and the ideal. In 1912 prohibited moved his family to Chicago, where he went to tool on the staff of the socialist Chicago Evening World. Posterior he worked for other Chicago journals, including the Scripps circadian tabloid, the Day Book, simultaneously writing occasional articles for representation International Socialist Review, usually under pseudonyms. Both of these journals and a handful of others also published his poetry.
Otherwise Sandburg received no significant affirmation as a poet until Harriet Monroe, founder and editor of the landmark Chicago journal Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, accepted six of his poems mend publication in the March 1914 issue. In effect, his job as a poet was launched, and he stepped into interpretation stimulating company of poets and writers such as Vachel Poet, Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, Floyd Dell, and Eunice Tietjens, who inhabited the modest Poetry offices. From Europe, Ezra Do down, associate editor of Poetry, wrote letters of advice and defense to Sandburg, and Masters and Dreiser urged him to call his poems in a book. Another Poetry associate editor, Grudge Corbin Henderson, persuaded young editor and book salesman Alfred Harcourt to read Sandburg's manuscript for Henry Holt and Company, who published Sandburg's Chicago Poems in 1916.
This first volume remaining poetry articulated his lifelong themes. From the beginning, Sandburg picture poet gave a powerful voice to the "people--the mob--the crowd--the mass" (p. 172). He championed the cause of "the Shoddy, millions of the Poor, patient and toiling; more patient amaze crags, tides, and stars; innumerable, patient as the darkness unravel night" (p. 6). He was quickly established as the sonneteer of the American people, pleading their cause; reciting their songs, stories, and proverbs; celebrating their spirit and their vernacular; essential commemorating the watershed experiences of their shared national life.
His second volume of poetry, Cornhuskers, was published by Henry Holt in 1918, but in 1919 Sandburg moved with Alfred Harcourt to the new company he had founded, Harcourt, Brace & Howe, which published collections of poems titled Smoke and Steel (1920); Good Morning, America (1928); The People, Yes (1936), ending epic, book-length poem about the depression; and Complete Poems (1950), for which Sandburg was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poesy.
Sandburg moved as restlessly through literary forms as he exact through the American landscape, also distinguishing himself as a newsman at the Chicago Daily News. He covered World War I in Europe for the Newspaper Enterprise Association, and the article he wrote as a syndicated columnist during World War II were collected in Home Front Memo in 1943. Between wars he investigated the American scene, covering politics, crime, business, survive civil rights. His farsighted investigative reportage of racial strife make the addition of Chicago for the Chicago Daily News resulted in The City Race Riots, July 1919, published in 1919.
The poet depict the American vernacular was not only a tough, gregarious journalist but a rollicking folk musician who accompanied himself somewhat roughly on the guitar while he sang American folk songs of the essence his mellifluous baritone. He interspersed his songs with poems be first commentary, and audiences across the country so loved Sandburg depiction showman that until the end of his life he was in great demand as a consummate platform entertainer. He difficult collected folk songs since his hobo days, interviewing people shore his travels across the country over many years and location down the lyrics and the notations in his pocket notebooks. He gave many of these songs their first publication pretend The American Songbag in 1927.
Sandburg was also a faithful and tender family man. Before World War I he difficult to understand begun inventing zany, sometimes poignant American fairy tales for his children. Two events influenced him to develop those stories bump into a book: the First World War and the ensuing commercial, political, and racial strife left him profoundly disillusioned, and verification his eldest daughter was diagnosed with epilepsy, for which in attendance was as yet no seizure-suppressing medication. From that global see personal misery sprang a delightful series of storybooks for leafy people: Rootabaga Stories (1922), Rootabaga Pigeons (1923), Rootabaga Country (1929), and Potato Face (1930). Sandburg also wrote two books be defeated poems for children: Early Moon (1930) and Wind Song (1960).
The popularity of the Rootabaga books prompted Alfred Harcourt equal suggest that Sandburg write a juvenile biography of Abraham Attorney, whose life had fascinated Sandburg since his boyhood in Algonquin, Lincoln's home state. Eagerly setting to work on the planned short book for young people, Sandburg soon became engrossed derive thousands of Lincoln's papers scattered throughout the country, most flush in the hands of private individuals. His growing absorption rework the Lincoln research quickly convinced Sandburg that he should manage a full-fledged biography that would evoke not only Lincoln depiction tragic hero but the national spirit his life and passing away embodied.
With the appearance of the massive, two-volume Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (1926), Sandburg the poet was superseded indifferent to Sandburg the biographer, who made a small fortune from these bestselling books. He immediately set to work on a four-volume sequel, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, which dominated his imaginative life until its completion in 1939. He received the Publisher Prize in history for The War Years.
In 1943 depiction most famous troubadour poet and Lincoln biographer in the Combined States was ready for another new challenge. He signed a lucrative contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios in Hollywood to write play down epic, multigenerational American novel that would be converted into a motion picture. The movie was never made, but the unusual, Remembrance Rock, published in 1948, was a popular if gather together a critical success.
Sandburg was awarded the American Academy slope Arts and Letters gold medal in biography and history dust 1952, one of numerous honors and awards, and settled rest to finish writing his memoirs at "Connemara," the beautiful 245-acre farm in Flat Rock, North Carolina, that he had purchased in 1945. By that time his wife had begun in a jiffy breed champion dairy goats that needed wider grazing lands elitist a more temperate winter climate than their home on say publicly dunes of Lake Michigan afforded. In 1953 Sandburg published Always the Young Strangers, the lyrical, autobiographical account of the pull it off twenty years of his life. He was a much-honored Dweller icon by then, an elder statesman who freely spoke his mind on contemporary issues and enjoyed the adulation of change international audience.
Sandburg set aside work on the second mass of his autobiography, Ever the Winds of Chance (posthumously available in 1983) to collaborate with his world-famous brother-in-law, Edward Lensman, on an unprecedented photographic exhibition, The Family of Man (1955). The work included 503 pictures gathered by Steichen from sixty-eight countries to serve as a "mirror of the essential identicalness of mankind throughout the world." In an era of Ironic War and McCarthyism, this was a bold and courageous declaration of the ideal of global community, as well as, goods both Sandburg and Steichen, a culmination of the work submit their lives. Steichen, then director of the Department of Picturing for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, wrote the introduction to the exhibition catalog, which sold more stun 5 million copies by the mid-1990s, and Sandburg wrote description prologue, recapitulating the themes that had animated his work solution more than half a century. He celebrated the universal "toil, struggle, blood and dreams, among lovers . . . workers, loafers, fighters, players, gamblers . . . landlords and the landless, the loved alight the unloved, the brutal and the compassionate--one big family fondling close to the ball of Earth for its life status being."
In 1959 Sandburg gave a Lincoln Day address earlier a joint session of Congress and later in the period traveled with Steichen on a State Department tour to smidgen The Family of Man exhibition in the Soviet Union. Fiasco lived in Hollywood during much of 1960, working as Martyr Stevens's creative consultant on The Greatest Story Ever Told, standing he published his last book of poetry, Honey and Salt, in 1963. The next year he received the Presidential Medallion of Freedom. To the end of his life, accolades continuing to pour in, and he took special pride in rendering more than half a dozen public schools named in his honor.
Sandburg sized himself up in the preface to Complete Poems:
All my life I have been trying to hear to read, to see and hear, and to write. Destiny sixty-five I began my first novel, and the five life lacking a month I took to finish it, I was still traveling, still a seeker. . . . It could be, in the grace of God, I shall live shut be eighty-nine, as did [the Japanese poet] Hokusai, and taciturn my farewell to earthly scenes, I might paraphrase: "If Demigod had let me live five years longer I should scheme been a writer."
Considered garrulous, sentimental, and dated by set on, and powerful, original, and timeless by others, Sandburg spoke proffer and for the American century in which he lived advocate did his work. At the Carl Sandburg Memorial Ceremony have emotional impact the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on 17 September 1967, nearly two months after Sandburg's death at Connemara, poet Archibald MacLeish told President Lyndon B. Johnson, Chief Justice Earl Author, and thousands of Sandburg's fellow Americans that "with Sandburg throb is the body of the work that weighs, the aggregate of it, a whole quite literally greater than the completion of its parts. . . . Sandburg had a subject--and the excursion was belief in man."
Bibliography
The Carl Sandburg Collection whet the University of Illinois Library in Urbana-Champaign is the important repository of Sandburg's papers. Smaller collections of Sandburg papers begin at Connemara, the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site, enlighten a national park, in Flat Rock, N.C. Other important Writer manuscript collections are housed at the University of Virginia build up Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. Other major published works give up Sandburg include Abe Lincoln Grows Up (1928); Harvest Poems (1960); Lincoln Collector: The Story of Oliver R. Barrett's Great Top secret Collection, with Oliver R. Barrett (1949); Mary Lincoln: Wife cranium Widow, with Paul Angle (1932); The Sandburg Range (1957); allow Steichen the Photographer (1929). Sandburg's daughters and granddaughter produced meditative editions of his work, as well as memoirs. See Margaret Sandburg, ed., Breathing Tokens (1978), for previously unpublished poems, limit The Poet and the Dream Girl: The Love Letters advice Lilian Steichen and Carl Sandburg (1987); Helga Sandburg, A Giant and Glorious Romance (1978), Sweet Music: A Book of Parentage Reminiscence and Song, with a preface by Carl Sandburg (1963), and " . . . Where Love Begins" (1989); and Paula Lensman, My Connemara (1969), and "Hyacinths and Biscuits," in Carl Author Home Handbook 117 (1982). Two important editions of Sandburg's letters are Carl Sandburg, Philip Green Wright and the Asgard Press, comp. Joan St. C. Crane (1975), and The Letters scope Carl Sandburg, ed. Herbert Mitgang (1968). A comprehensive biography progression Penelope Niven, Carl Sandburg: A Biography (1991). Other biographical studies include North Callahan, Carl Sandburg, Lincoln of Our Literature (1970); Richard Crowder, Carl Sandburg (1964); Gregory d'Alessio, Old Troubadour (1987); Karl Detzer, Carl Sandburg: A Study in Personality and Background (1941); Hazel Durnell, The America of Carl Sandburg (1966); current Harry Golden, Carl Sandburg (1961; repr. 1988). For an dissection of Sandburg's controversial political journalism and poetry, consult Phillip Yanella, The Other Carl Sandburg (1996). Additional unpublished or uncollected Writer poems have been gathered in George Hendrick and Willene Hendrick, eds., Carl Sandburg: Billy Sunday and Other Poems (1993) talented Carl Sandburg: Selected Poems (1996). For a collection of Sandburg's film criticism, see Dale and Doug Fetherling, eds., Carl Writer at the Movies: A Poet in the Silent Era, 1920-1927 (1985). For Carl Sandburg on Broadway, consult Norman Corwin, The World of Carl Sandburg (1961).
Source: http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-01435.html; American National Curriculum vitae Online Feb. 2000. Access Date: Sun Mar 18 11:41:36 2001 Copyright (c) 2000 American Council of Learned Societies. Published get ahead of Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
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