Queer Places:
313 E 3rd St, Galesburg, IL 61401
331 S York St, Elmhurst, IL 60126
Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site, 1800 Little River Rd, Flat Rock, NC 28731
Carl
August Sandburg (January 6, 1878 – July 22, 1967) was an American poet,
biographer, journalist, and editor. He won three Pulitzer
Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham
Lincoln. During his lifetime, Sandburg was widely regarded as "a major
figure in contemporary literature", especially for volumes of his collected
verse, including Chicago
Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), and Smoke and Steel (1920).[2] He
enjoyed "unrivaled appeal as a poet in his day, perhaps because the breadth of
his experiences connected him with so many strands of American life",[3] and
at his death in 1967, President Lyndon
B. Johnson observed that "Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of
America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America."[4]
Carl Sandburg was born in a three-room cottage at 313 East Third Street in Galesburg,
Illinois, to Clara Mathilda Anderson and August Sandberg,[1] both
of Swedish ancestry.[5] He
adopted the nickname "Charles" or "Charlie" in elementary school at about the
same time he and his two oldest siblings changed the spelling of their last
name to "Sandburg".[1][6][7]
At the age of thirteen he left school and began driving a milk wagon. From the
age of about fourteen until he was seventeen or eighteen, he worked as a
porter at the Union Hotel barbershop in Galesburg.[8] After
that he was on the milk route again for 18 months. He then became a bricklayer
and a farm laborer on the wheat plains of Kansas.[9] After
an interval spent at Lombard
College in Galesburg,[10] he
became a hotel servant in Denver,
then a coal-heaver in Omaha. He began his writing career as a journalist for
the Chicago Daily
News. Later he wrote poetry, history, biographies, novels, children's
literature, and film reviews. Sandburg also collected and edited books of
ballads and folklore. He spent most of his life in Illinois, Wisconsin,
and Michigan before
moving to North
Carolina. Sandburg volunteered to go to the military during the Spanish–American
War and was stationed in Puerto Rico with the 6th Illinois Infantry,[11] disembarking
at Guánica, Puerto
Rico on July 25, 1898. Sandburg was never actually called to battle. He
attended West
Point for just two weeks before failing a mathematics and grammar exam.
Sandburg returned to Galesburg and entered Lombard
College but left without a degree in 1903. He then moved to Milwaukee,
Wisconsin to work for a newspaper, and also joined the Wisconsin Social
Democratic Party, the name by which the Socialist
Party of America was known in the state. Sandburg served as a secretary
to Emil Seidel, socialist mayor
of Milwaukee from 1910 to 1912. Carl Sanburg later remarked that Milwaukee
was where he got his bearings and that the rest of his life had been "the
unrolling of a scene that started up in Wisconsin".[12]
Carl Sandburg House, Chicago
Sandburg met Lilian
Steichen (1883-1977) at the Milwaukee Social Democratic Party office in
1907, and they married the next year in Milwaukee. Lilian's brother was the
famous photographer Edward
Steichen. Sandburg with his wife, whom he called Paula, raised three
daughters. The Sandburgs
moved to Harbert,
Michigan, and then to suburban Chicago,
Illinois in 1912 after he was offered a job by a Chicago newspaper. [13] They
lived in Evanston,
Illinois before settling at 331 South York Street in Elmhurst,
Illinois, from 1919 to 1930. During the time, Sandburg wrote Chicago
Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), and Smoke and Steel (1920).[2] In
1919 Sandburg won a Pulitzer Prize "made possible by a special grant from The
Poetry Society" for his collection Cornhuskers.[14] Sandburg
also wrote three children's books in Elmhurst: Rootabaga Stories, in 1922,
followed by Rootabaga Pigeons (1923), and Potato Face (1930). Sandburg also
wrote Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, a two-volume biography, in 1926, The
American Songbag (1927), and a book of poems called Good Morning,
America (1928) in Elmhurst. The Sandburg house at 331 South York Street in
Elmhurst was demolished and the site is now a parking lot. The family moved to
Michigan in 1930. Sandburg won the 1940 Pulitzer
Prize for History for the four-volume The War Years, the sequel to
his Abraham Lincoln, and a second Poetry Pulitzer in 1951 for Complete Poems.[14][15][note
1] In 1945 he moved to Connemara,
a 246-acre (100 ha) rural estate in Flat
Rock, North Carolina. Here he produced a little over a third of his total
published work and lived with his wife, daughters, and two grandchildren.[16]
On February 12, 1959, in commemorations of the 150th anniversary of Abraham
Lincoln's birth, Congress met in joint
session to hear actor Fredric
March give a dramatic reading of the Gettysburg
Address, followed by an address by Sandburg.[17]
Sandburg supported the Civil
Rights Movement and was the first white man to be honored by the NAACP with
their Silver Plaque Award as a "major prophet of civil rights in our time."[18]
Sandburg died of natural
causes in 1967 and his body was cremated. The ashes were interred under
"Remembrance Rock", a granite boulder located behind his birth house in
Galesburg.[19][note
2]
My published books:
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