Carl Sandburg

Signed and dated 1962 copy of his most famous poem, “The Fog”, clipped from a book. Accompanied by vintage unsigned photo of Sandburg signing a book.

CARL SANDBURG (1878-1967) was an American writer and editor, best known for his poetry. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his poetry and another for a biography of Abraham Lincoln. H. L. Mencken called Carl Sandburg “indubitably an American in every pulse-beat.”

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, and City of the Big Shoulders.”

Sandburg is also remembered by generations of children for his Rootabaga Stories and Rootabaga Pigeons, 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” to match American childhood. He felt that the European stories involving royalty and knights were inappropriate, and so populated his stories with skyscrapers, trains, corn fairies and the “Five Marvelous Pretzels”.

Sandburg earned one Pulitzer Prize for his collection The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, and another for his biography of Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. 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.

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