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Markers of Distinction

Carl Sandburg
1878–1967
Writer and poet

Poet, journalist and historian, Carl Sandburg was
one of the most famous literary figures of the 20th
century. Born in Galesburg, Illinois, the son of
Swedish immigrants, he left home in his early teens
to travel, earning money digging potatoes,
harvesting wheat, blacking stoves and working on
railroads and steamboats. Many of the themes and
images Sandburg used in his poems were of the
rural and urban laborers he encountered.

Sandburg published his first book of poetry,
In Reckless Ecstasy, in 1904. Shortly thereafter,
he moved to Milwaukee and married Lillian
Steichen, sister of photographer Edward Steichen.
The family moved here to 4646 North Hermitage
Avenue in 1912, and Sandburg began writing for
the Chicago Daily News. It was here that the
famous poem Chicago was written.

Early collections of his poems include Chicago Poems (1916) and Smoke and Steel (1920). Sandburg’s use of free verse—lacking regular rhymes or metrical pattern— scattered with street-corner slang and anecdotes ushered in an era of poetic modernism.

Sandburg also wrote a six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln. The last volume earned him the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1940. His Complete Poems won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1951, and in 1964 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.