Carl Sandburg was born on January 6, 1878, in Galesburg, Illinois, to poor Swedish immigrants. Sandburg was unable to pursue education immediately after graduating from eighth grade because of his family’s financial situation. At thirteen, he worked odd jobs around his hometown to supplement his father’s income from an Illinois railroad company and his mother’s wages as a hotel maid. Despite their fiscal troubles, the Sandburgs instilled in Carl and his six siblings the value of hard work and education.

Around the time Sandburg would have graduated high school, he left his hometown and traveled by train to Kansas in search of work, hiding in boxcars to avoid buying a ticket. When he returned home, he volunteered to fight in the Spanish-American War and served for eight months. His service qualified him for a tuition-free … [His lifelong interest in Abraham Lincoln, which spawned two multiple-volume biographies, earned him immense respect and the 1939 Pulitzer Prize in History] …education at Lombard College in Galesburg where he attended for four years, but he never received a diploma. There, Sandburg met Philip Green Wright, a professor who encouraged the young poet to pursue writing and actually funded and supervised the publishing of his first collections of poetry, In Reckless Ecstasy (1904), Incidentals (1907), and The Plaint of a Rose (1909), which were originally printed as pamphlets. Sandburg did not publish poetry for several more years; in the meantime, he worked as a reporter, taking a position as a secretary to the first socialist mayor in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and married Lillian Steichen.

Sandburg, his new wife, and their three young children then moved to Chicago, Illinois where he wrote editorials for the city’s Daily News. His poetry was published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse and several other literary magazines shortly after the move and further persuaded him to continue writing. Sandburg’s poetry celebrated with steadfast conviction all aspects of American life, no doubt significant to him because of his parents’ immigration. Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), and Smoke and Steel (1920) were filled with Sandburg’s ideas about the American dream, the magnificence in the nation’s both agricultural and industrial factions, and the unique distinction of Americans themselves. Sandburg was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1950 for his Collected Poems.

His lifelong interest in Abraham Lincoln, which spawned two multiple-volume biographies, earned him immense respect and the 1939 Pulitzer Prize in History. Sandburg also published very popular short story and poetry collections for children, as well as The New American Songbag (1950), a book of American folklore for adults.

Sandburg continued traveling the world and writing poetry until his death in 1967 at his home in North Carolina.