When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898
Sandburg volunteered for service, and at the age of twenty was ordered to
Puerto Rico, where he spent days battling only heat and mosquitoes. Upon
his return to his hometown later that year, he entered Lombard College,
supporting himself as a call fireman.
Sandburg's college years shaped
his literary talents and political views. While at Lombard, Sandburg
joined the Poor Writers' Club, an informal literary organization whose
members met to read and criticize poetry. Poor Writers' founder, Lombard
professor Phillip Green Wright, a talented scholar and political liberal,
encouraged the talented young Sandbur
Sandburg honed his writing skills and adopted the
socialist views of his mentor before leaving school in his senior year.
Sandburg sold stereoscope views and wrote poetry for two years before his
first book of verse, In Reckless Ecstasy, was printed on Wright's basement
press in 1904. Wright printed two more volumes for Sandburg, Incidentals
(1907) and The Plaint of a Rose (1908).
As the first decade of the century wore on,
Sandburg grew increasingly concerned with the plight of the American
worker. In 1907 he worked as an organizer for the Wisconsin Social
Democratic party, writing and distributing political pamphlets and
literature. At party headquarters in Milwaukee, Sandburg met Lilian
Steichen, whom he married in 1908.
The responsibilities of marriage and family
prompted a career change. Sandburg returned to Illinois and took up
journalism. For several years he worked as a reporter for the Chicago
Daily News, covering mostly labor issues and later writing his own
feature.
Sandburg was virtually unknown to the literary
world when, in 1914, a group of his poems appeared in the nationally
circulated Poetry magazine. Two years later his book Chicago Poems was
published, and the thirty-eight-year-old author found himself on the brink
of a career that would bring him international acclaim. Sandburg published
another volume of poems, Cornhuskers, in 1918, and wrote a searching
analysis of the 1919 Chicago race riots.
More poetry followed, along with Rootabaga
Stories (1922), a book of fanciful children's tales. That book prompted
Sandburg's publisher, Alfred Harcourt, to suggest a biography of Abraham
Lincoln for children. Sandburg researched and wrote for three years,
producing not a children's book, but a two-volume biography for adults.
His Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, published in 1926, was Sandburg's
first financial success. He moved to a new home on the Michigan dunes and
devoted the next several years to completing four additional volumes,
Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in
1940. Sandburg continued his prolific writing, publishing more poems, a
novel, Remembrance Rock, a second volume of folk songs, and an
autobiography, Always the Young Strangers. In 1945 the Sandburgs moved
with their herd of prize-winning goats and thousands of books to Flat
Rock, North Carolina. Sandburg's Complete Poems won him a second Pulitzer
Prize in 1951. Sandburg died at his North Carolina home July 22, 1967. His
ashes were returned, as he had requested, to his Galesburg birthplace. In
the small Carl Sandburg Park behind the house, his ashes were placed
beneath Remembrance Rock, a red granite boulder. Ten years later the ashes
of his wife were placed there.
