Life
Carl Sandburg was born in a three-room cottage at 313 East Third Street in Galesburg, Illinois, to Clara Mathilda (née Anderson) and August Sandberg, both of Swedish ancestry. He adopted the nickname "Charles" or “Charlie” in elementary school and, along with his two oldest siblings, changed the spelling of the family name to "Sandburg".
At the age of thirteen Sandburg left school and began driving a milk wagon. Between approximately ages fourteen and seventeen or eighteen he worked as a porter at the Union Hotel barbershop in Galesburg. He later returned to the milk route for eighteen months before working as a bricklayer and a farm laborer on the wheat plains of Kansas.
After a period at Lombard College in Galesburg Sandburg worked in various jobs, including as a hotel servant in Denver and a coal-heaver in Omaha, Nebraska. He began his writing career as a journalist for the Chicago Daily News and went on to write poetry, history, biographies, novels, children's literature, and film reviews. He also collected and edited books of ballads and folklore. Sandburg lived primarily in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan before moving to North Carolina.
During the Spanish–American War Sandburg volunteered for military service and was stationed in Puerto Rico with the 6th Illinois Infantry, landing at Guánica on July 25, 1898, though he did not see combat. He attended the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, for two weeks but left after failing mathematics and grammar examinations. He returned to Galesburg and entered Lombard College, leaving without a degree in 1903.
Sandburg subsequently moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he worked for a newspaper and joined the Wisconsin Social Democratic Party, affiliated with the Socialist Party of America. Sandburg served as secretary to Emil Seidel, Milwaukee's socialist mayor from 1910 to 1912. Sandburg later stated that his experiences in Milwaukee were formative for his life and work.
In 1907 Sandburg met Lilian Steichen (1883–1977), sister of photographer Edward Steichen, at the Milwaukee Social Democratic Party office. They married the following year and had three daughters. Their first daughter Margaret was born in 1911. The family later lived in Harbert, Michigan; the Ravenswood neighborhood of Chicago; and then in Maywood, Illinois. From 1919 to 1930 they resided at 331 South York Street in Elmhurst, Illinois.
During his years living in Chicago's western suburbs Sandburg published several major works, including Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), and Smoke and Steel (1920). He received a Pulitzer Prize in 1919, funded by a special grant from the Poetry Society of America, for Cornhuskers. He also wrote three children's books—Rootabaga Stories (1922), Rootabaga Pigeons (1923), and Potato Face (1930)—as well as Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (1926), The American Songbag (1927), and Good Morning, America (1928). The Elmhurst home was later demolished; the site is now a parking lot.
Sandburg moved to Michigan in 1930. In 1940 he won the Pulitzer Prize for History for Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, the four-volume sequel to The Prairie Years, and in 1951 received a second Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Complete Poems. In 1945 he settled at Connemara, a 246-acre (100 ha) estate in Flat Rock, Henderson County, North Carolina, where he lived with his wife, daughters, and grandchildren and produced a substantial portion of his later writings.
On February 12, 1959, during the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, Sandburg delivered an address before a joint session of Congress following actor Fredric March’s reading of the Gettysburg Address. Sandburg supported the civil rights movement and received the NAACP Silver Plaque Award in recognition of his contributions to civil rights.
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.
