Carl Sandburg was an American writer and editor, best known for his poetry. He also won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his poetry and another for a biography of Abraham Lincoln. Additoinally, he was awarded a Grammy Award in 1959 for Best Performance -Documentary or Spoken Word (Other Than Comedy) for his recording of Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait with the New York Philharmonic.
Carl Sandburg, whose family had Swedish ancestry, was born in a three-room cottage at 313 East Third Street in Galesburg on January 6, 1878. The modest house, maintained by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, reflects the typical living conditions of a late nineteenth century working-class family. Many of the furnishings that are in the home once belonged to the Sandburg family. The ashes of Carl Sandburg, who died in 1967, and there beneath Remembrance Rock in the small wooded park behind the home.
At the age of thirteen he left school and began driving a milk wagon. He also subsequently became a bricklayer and a farm laborer on the wheat plains of Kansas. Then, after time spent at Lombard College in Galesburg, he became a hotel servant in Denver, then a coal-heaver in Omaha. He began his writing career while employed as a journalist for the Chicago Daily News. Later he also wrote poetry, history, biographies, novels, children's literature and film reviews. Sandburg was also an avid collector of edited books of ballads and folklore. He spent most of his life in the Midwest before moving to North Carolina.
Sandburg fought in the Spanish-American War with the 6th Illinois Infantry, and participated in the invasion of Puerto Rico on July 25, 1898. After the war Sandburg returned to Galesburg and Lombard College, but left again, without a degree, in 1903.
He then moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin and joined the Social Democratic Party. Sandburg met Lillian Steichen at the Social Democratic Party office in 1907, and they married in 1908. Sandburg and his wife, whom he called Paula, raised three daughters. Sandburg served as a secretary to the mayor of Milwaukee from 1910 to 1912.
The Sandburg's moved to Harbert, Michigan, and then to suburban Chicago, Illinois. They lived in Evanston, Illinois before settling at 331 S. York Street in Elmhurst, Illinois from 1919 to 1930. While there, Sandburg wrote three children's books in Elmhurst, Rootabaga Stories, in 1922, followed by Rootabaga Pigeons, in 1923, and Potato Face, 1930. Sandburg also wrote Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, a two volume biography, in 1926, The American Songbag, in 1927, and a book of poems Good Morning, America , in 1928, while living in Elmhurst. The family then moved to Michigan in 1930.
His final move was to a Flat Rock, North Carolina estate, known as Connemara, in 1945, where he lived until his death in 1967 at the age of 89. His wife would follow ten years later. Both of their remains were cremated and their ashes were buried at Carl Sandburg's birthplace in Galesburg, Illinois beneath a large boulder named after Carl Sandburg's first and only novel, Remembrance Rock.
Sandburg, a supporter of the civil rights movement, contributed to the NAACP.
It is interesting to note that much of Carl Sandburg's poetry, such as "Chicago", focused on Chicago, Illinois, where he spent time as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and the Day Book. His most famous description of the city is as "Hog Butcher for the World/Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat/Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler,/Stormy, Husky, Brawling, City of the Big Shoulders."
Sandburg is also remembered by generations of children for his Rootabaga Stories and Rootabaga Pigeons, which are a series of whimsical, sometimes melancholy stories he originally created for his own daughters. The Rootabaga Stories were born of Sandburg's desire for "American fairy tales" that would match American childhood. He felt that the European stories that involved royalty and knights were inappropriate, and so he populated his stories with skyscrapers, trains, corn fairies and the "Five Marvelous Pretzels".