(Image Source: Chicago Public Radio)
Carl Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois. He left school after the eighth grade to help support his family, but later attended Lombard College. In 1897 he embarked on a series of travels across America. His first collection of poetry, Chicago Poems, was published in 1914 and was followed by several highly acclaimed and immensely popular volumes, including Cornhusker (1918), which documents Sandburg’s war experience, and Smoke and Steel (1920), in which his disillusionment with post-World War Ⅰ America anticipates T.S. Renaissance, along with architect Frank Lloyd Wright, novelist Theodore Dreiser, and poets Vachel Lindsay and Edgar Lee Master. In the 1930s Sandburg became active in the Socialist movement. In addition to writing poetry, he devoted thirty years to the study of Abraham Lincoln and traveled the country in search of folk songs and ballads, which he collected as The American Song-Bag (1927). He also wrote novels and children’s stories. Overall, he shared Walt Whitman’s and the Futurists’ scene and admiration for the spirit of common laborers. Although his work eventually lost its once immense popularity, Sandburg’s interest in and passion for ordinary life never waned. (Biographical Summary from Norton's Anthology of Poetry, 4th Edition.)
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