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I see America, not in the setting sun of a black night of despair ahead of us, 
I see America in the crimson light of a rising sun 
fresh from the burning, creative hand of God. 
I see great days ahead, 
great days possible to men and women of will and vision.
~ Carl Sandburg ~

Carl August Sandburg was born on January 6, 1878 in Galesburg, Illinois. He was a poet, writer, and folk musician. His parents were August Sandburg and Clara Mathilda Anderson. They were Swedish immigrants who had met when August Sandburg was working on the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad in Galesburg. Clara Mathilda Anderson was a hotel maid in Bushnell, Illinois. Carl's parents didn't have much money, but they instilled in all seven of their children the importance of hard work, a good education, and honor for America. Carl Sandburg made his name American when he went into the first grade. He then signed his papers and early work as a poet, orator, and journalist "Charles A. Sandburg." 

Carl Sandburg quit school after the eighth grade. He started shining shoes, delivering milk and newspapers, and working at other little jobs. He developed a desire to travel, which he did on his father's railroad pass. He used the pass to travel to Chicago, which is a city where he was a reporter and a poet. In 1897 Carl Sandburg hid away inside railroad boxcars and worked his way west by train looking for jobs along with thousands of other Americans. 

A few months later, Sandburg went back to his hometown as a housepainter. Then he signed up for Company C of the Sixth Infantry Regiment of the Illinois Volunteers to serve in the Spanish-American War. He served in Puerto Rico in 1898 of July and August. In October of that same year, he was able to qualify for admission to Lombard College with free tuition even though he did not graduate from high school, because of his status as a war veteran. He was also signed up for an appointment with the U.S. Military Academy. He traveled to West Point to take the entrance tests, but failed them. He went back to Lombard until May of 1902. 

He didn't graduate from college, but his education gave him a desire to read and write poetry. He was encouraged by Philip Green Wright, one of his professors at Lombard who was also considered to be his mentor. Wright used a small handpress to produce four leaflets by Charles A. Sandburg. They were called In Reckless Ecstasy (1904), Incidentals (1907), The Plaint of a Rose (1908), and Joseffy (1910). Carl Sandburg's favorite writers were Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Browning, and Elbert Hubbard. Sandburg used some of their fashions of writing in his own writings.

Sandburg really liked to roam the country, and he supported himself by selling Underwood and Underwood stereoscopic pictures. He also gave lectures on Whitman, George Bernard Shaw, and Abraham Lincoln. When that didn't support him, he "rode the rods" on a freight train, which sometimes landed him in jail. In 1902, he was left in the Allegheny Count Jail in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania because he couldn't pay for the train ride. Sandburg wrote for some journals in Chicago from 1902 through 1907. 

Winfield P. Gaylord, Wisconsin Social-Democratic party leader, invited Sandburg to become a party organizer. Gaylord was impressed with Sandburg's ability to make speeches. Sandburg worked on his campaign for social democracy from 1907 to 1912. He wrote for newspapers and journals and made speeches. In 1910, he became secretary to Emil Seidel, the first socialist mayor of Milwaukee. In December of 1907, Sandburg met Lilian Steichan at a Social-Democratic party in Milwaukee. Lilian was a Socialist and a schoolteacher who graduated from the University of Chicago in 1904. From January through June of 1908, Lilian Steichan and Charles Sandburg communicated. He was in Wisconsin and she was teaching in Princeton, Illinois. They were married in Milwaukee in 1908. Carl Sandburg and Lilian Steichan had three kids. Charles Sandburg reclaimed his birth name, Carl Sandburg, with the encouragement of his wife.

While Sandburg was in Milwaukee, he wrote poems so freely and unconventionally realistic that he didn't even know if they were poetry. He worked on writing about the problems of the children he ran into in the Milwaukee municipal office. His work with the Social-Democratic party politics in Milwaukee didn't work out because he was into social justice and equality, and the parties had a gap between reality and the ideal. He and his family moved to Chicago in 1912. He started to work on the socialist Chicago Evening World. He also worked for other Chicago journals including the Day Book and the International Socialist Review. Both of those journals published some of his poetry.

Harriet Monroe, founder and editor of the Chicago journal Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, published six of his poem in March of 1914. That is when he became a real poet. Ezra Pound, associate editor of Poetry encouraged Sandburg in his poetry. Fellow poets encouraged him to collect his poems in a book. In 1916 Alice Corbin Henderson, another Poetry associate editor, talked editor and book salesman Alfred Harcourt to read Sandburg's manuscript for Henry Holt and Company, and they published Sandburg's Chicago Poems.

That first volume of poetry was filled with his life. He gave a powerful voice to the poor. He quickly became the poet of the American people. He stuck up for the poor and said what they felt for them. He pleaded their cause; recited their songs, stories, and proverbs; wrote about the experiences of their lives. Cornhuskers was his second volume of poetry. It was published in 1918 by Henry Holt. In 1919, Sandburg moved to a new company, Harcourt, Brace & Howe, founded by Alfred Harcourt. Harcourt, Brace & Howe published several collections of his poems including Smoke and Steel; Good Morning, America; The People, Yes; and Complete Poems which gained Sandburg the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.

Sandburg was a journalist at the Chicago Daily News. He wrote about World War I for the Newspaper Enterprise Association. In 1943 the articles he wrote about World War II were collected in Home Front Memo. He researched the American life, like politics, crime, business, and civil rights. His reporting of racial strife in Chicago for the Chicago Daily News resulted in the publishing of The Chicago Race Riots in 1919. 

Carl Sandburg was also a folk musician who played the guitar while he sang American folk songs. He included poems and commentary also with his songs. He became known as an entertainer from that time on. Audiences loved him. He had written down many of his folk songs from people he interviewed on his travels. The American Songbag was published in 1927, and included some of the songs he had collected.

Sandburg was a devoted family man. Before World War I, he had invented some American fairy tales for his children. The two events that encouraged him to make the stories into a book were World War I and then his oldest daughter being diagnosed with epilepsy. At that time there was no suppressing medication for it. Those two events caused Sandburg to develop some storybooks for children. He wrote Rootabago Stories, Rootabaga Pigeons, Rootabaga Country, and Potato Face. He also wrote two children's books of poems: Early Moon and Wind Song.

Because the Rootabaga books were so popular, Alfred Harcourt encouraged Sandburg to write a biography of Abraham Lincoln for young people. Sandburg was really into Lincoln's life from the time he was a child. Sandburg grew up in Lincoln's home state. Sandburg spent time researching thousands of Lincoln's papers. He was so into researching that he decided to make a full biography of Lincoln that would show him as a hero and show that his spirit lives on in America even after his death. His biography was two volumes and was called Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years. Sandburg was not only a poet now. He was a biographer who made a small fortune on those books. The he spent a good part of his life creating a four-volume sequel called Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. The War Years received the Pulitzer Prize for Sandburg. Sandburg received a second Pulitzer Prize for his Complete Poems in 1950. His final volumes of poetry were Harvest Poems, and Honey and Salt. Carl Sandburg died in 1967.

About two months after the death of Sandburg at Connemara, poet Archibald MacLeish told President Lyndon B. Johnson, Chief Justice Earl Warren, and thousands of others that "with Sandburg it is the body of the work that weighs, the sum of it, a whole quite literally greater than the total of its parts....Sandburg had a subject--and the subject was belief in man."

The deepest American dream is not the hunger for money or fame; it is the dream of settling down, in peace and freedom and cooperation, in the promised land. 
~ Carl Sandburg ~

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