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Throughout Carl Sandburg’s work as a poet and songwriter, he supports the American Dream. His writing mirrors his life as an immigrant who rises to success, his work describes individuals overcoming adversity through community support, and also elaborates on how being in America gives you so many opportunities to complete your goals.

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Carl Sandburg’s work represents how he lived his life and how he thought. His work on Abraham Lincoln is a great example of this. He explains what he liked about what Abraham Lincon did and he also liked how he led. It says in the Biography, Sandburg, Carl 1878-1967,  that he fantasized about his life and how he thought and led. He loved the way that he led in the war. It also said that because Carl Sandburg did so much work on Abraham Lincoln that he moved away from socialism and more towards Democracy. This shows that he supported the American dream because Lincoln was one of the pathfinders of America and how the foundation of America is run. This comes with him helping to create the American dream in itself. Carl looks up to him in such a way he believes in what Lincoln did and almost wants to be like him. He believes in the dream that Lincoln helped create and the dream that he had in his own life. It also shows he started to believe more in the American values making it even more apparent he likes the way of the American dream.

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Born: January 06, 1878 in Galesburg, Illinois, United States

Died: July 22, 1967 in Flat Rock, North Carolina, United States

Other Names: Sandburg, Carl August; Sandburg, Charles A.

A Varied Career

Though best remembered for the poetry he wrote during the 1910s, Carl Sandburg is notable for a range of contributions to American letters, including not only poetry but also journalism and biography. A leading figure in a new group of literary talents emerging in the American Midwest, Sandburg, like a handful of his contemporaries, did not go to New York to make a name in literary circles. Instead they remained in the heartland they wrote about. Sandburg repeatedly paid homage to his roots in his work. His literary fame began with a poem named for Chicago and peaked with a biography of the great president from his home state, Abraham Lincoln.

Early Wanderings

The son of Swedish immigrants, Carl August Sandburg was born on 6 January 1878 in Galesburg, Illinois. Though his father, a blacksmith, was illiterate, his mother loved books and encouraged her three children to read. Carl Sandburg dropped out of school after the eighth grade to help support the family, and during his early teens he worked in a barbershop, cut ice, delivered newspapers, and took whatever other jobs he could find around Galesburg. According to his biographer North Callahan, these experiences gave the boy "a kind of Gothic etching of the midwest" that later would appear in his writing. At nineteen Sandburg went to Kansas to work in the wheat fields and then lived as a hobo for a few months, riding freight trains and doing odd jobs in exchange for food. In April 1898, after the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, he enlisted in the army. Though his company was sent to Cuba, they saw no action and returned to Illinois in the fall. Because of his war service, Sandburg was given free tuition at Lombard College in Galesburg, where he studied the poetry of Walt Whitman and edited the campus literary magazine. In May 1902 he dropped out of school and headed east. For two years he worked as a salesman in New Jersey, writing poetry on the side.

Journalism, Socialism, and Marriage

Returning to the Midwest in 1904, Sandburg began nearly thirty years of journalistic work, becoming involved in the Socialist Party and writing for Socialist newspapers in Milwaukee and then Chicago. He met a young party activist named Lillian Steichen, sister of the photographer Edward Steichen, and married her. Over the next decade they had three daughters. The views on the oppression of the working class that Sandburg formed during this period influenced the poetry he was writing.

Chicago Poet and Reporter

During the early 1910s Sandburg wrote his "Chicago Poems"-including "Chicago," which characterized his adopted home as "Hog Butcher for the World." The editors of The American Magazine in New York rejected them, but Harriet Monroe, editor of the Chicago-based Poetry, published nine of them in the March 1914 issue. Two years later, when these poems were included in his first collection, Chicago Poems (1916), Monroe wrote that Sandburg's verse was "as personal as his slow speech or his massive gait; always a reverent beating-out of his subject." Continuing his newspaper work, Sandburg went to Stockholm in 1918 to serve as a war correspondent for the Newspaper Enterprise Association; back in Chicago in 1919, he covered the summer race riots of that year. That same year he won the Poetry Society of America Prize for his second full-length collection of poetry, Cornhuskers (1918).

The Lincoln Biography

During the 1920s Sandburg published three more volumes of verse, but his main focus was on his biography of Abraham Lincoln. He had long been fascinated by Lincoln's life: as a young soldier traveling through Washington during the Spanish-American War, Sandburg had visited Ford's Theater, where the president had been shot; in his coverage of the Chicago race riots of 1919, he had quoted the Emancipation Proclamation. By the early 1920s Sandburg had acquired more than a thousand books about Lincoln and had begun work on a biography. The two volumes of Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (1926) were followed in 1939 by Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, in four volumes. The War Years earned Sandburg the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1940 and the Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for history and biography in 1952.

The 1930s and 1940s

During the Depression of the 1930s Sandburg published The People, Yes (1936), a long poem in which he echoed President Franklin D. Roosevelt's belief that the hope for America lay in the strength of its people. This work and the Lincoln biography were evidence of Sandburg's shift away from Socialism and toward the Democratic Party. During World War II he narrated a government movie about the war, did foreign broadcasts for the Office of War Information, and published Home Front Memo (1943), a nonfiction work praising responsibility and duty. In 1948, the year he turned seventy, Sandburg published his first work of fiction, a historical novel called Remembrance Rock. It received poor reviews, but three years later his Complete Poems (1950) won him a second Pulitzer Prize.

Final Years

Sandburg worked well into his eighties. On his seventy-fifth birthday Always the Young Strangers (1953), an autobiographical account of his childhood, was published. He was frequently asked to participate in television and radio programs about Lincoln and addressed the U.S. Congress on the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's birth. On his eighty-fifth birthday he published his last volume of poems, Honey and Salt. He died four years later, on 22 July 1967, at the North Carolina home to which he had retired in 1945.

Sources:

North Callahan, Carl Sandburg: His Life and Works (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987);

Penelope Niven, Carl Sandburg: A Biography (New York: Scribners, 1991).

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Gale Document Number: GALE|CX3468300361

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Born: January 06, 1878 in Galesburg, Illinois, United States Died: July 22, 1967 in Flat Rock, North Carolina, United States Other Names: Sandburg, Carl August; Sandburg, Charles A. Though best remembered for the poetry he wrote during the 1910s, Carl Sandburg is notable for a range of contributions to American letters, including not only poetry but also journalism and biography.

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In Chicago a poem written by Carl Sandburg he gives lots of examples of how he supports the American dream and how he represents it. When he is talking about the city and the people that call Chicago home he says, “Come and show me another city with lifted heads singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.” (Sandburg,Chicago) This is saying even though some people think poorly of Chicago they are still proud. This is just like the American dream because you have to be proud to accomplish anything. He also says “Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness, Bareheaded, Shoveling, Wrecking, Planning, Building, breaking, rebuilding,” (Sandburg,Chicago)He also says when the city is broken it always rebuilds and comes back better. To accomplish the American dream you are going to run through portions that are bad and they are going to tear you down, but you always have to come back a better person. That is what he is saying about the whole city.

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Chicago by Carl Sandburg | Poetry Magazine

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In The People Yes he talks about what he believes what people should be like to other people and how the community should work with each other. He says "Love your neighbor as yourself but don't take down the fence"(Sandburg, The people yes) This shows that it is part of the American dream because you are going to need people to help you with your dreams and you want to love them, but at the same time, you still need to be your own independent person with your own goals and the ability to do it yourself. He also says "Let the gentle bush dig its root deep and spread upward to split the boulder"(Sandburg, The people yes) Here it is saying that you need to have a good base to be able to do anything to grow. That is what America is giving you, the ability to grow and succeed in the things you want to achieve.

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from The People, Yes by Carl Sandburg | Poetry Foundation