Sandburg, Carl August (1878–1967)

US poet. He worked as a farm labourer and a bricklayer, and his poetry celebrates ordinary life in the USA, as in Chicago Poems (1916), The People, Yes (1936), and Complete Poems (1950; Pulitzer Prize). In free verse, it is reminiscent of Walt Whitman's poetry. Sandburg also wrote a monumental biography of Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (1926; two volumes) and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (1939; four volumes; Pulitzer Prize). Always the Young Strangers (1953) is his autobiography.

Born in Galesburg, Illinois, where a Lincoln-Douglas debate had taken place 1858, Sandburg left school after the eighth grade to work. After serving in the Spanish-American War, he briefly attended college but never graduated. The American Songbag 1927 is his collection of folk ballads and songs assembled during his travels around the USA 1902–04. He also wrote Smoke and Steel 1920, Slabs of the Sunburnt West 1922, Mary Lincoln, Wife and Widow 1932, and Storm Over the Land 1942. Sandburg's children's books include Rootabaga Stories 1922.