Sandburg, Carl [August]
Sandburg, Carl [August]( 1878–1967),born in Galesburg, Ill., of a Swedish immigrant family, after irregular schooling, and a youth spent as an itinerant laborer throughout the Middle West, went to Puerto Rico as a soldier in the Spanish-American War. On his return he worked his way through Lombard College in Galesburg, and after leaving (1902) became an advertising writer, journalist, and organizer for the Social Democratic party in Wisconsin. He was secretary to the socialist mayor of Milwaukee (1910–12).
His earliest poems were privately printed in a small pamphlet (1904), but he was unknown as a poet until 1914, when Poetry published a number of his short pieces, including “Chicago,” whose fearless colloquialism and vigorous free verse stimulated a critical controversy and established him as the leading figure in the Chicago group of authors that was then beginning to flourish. Chicago Poems (1916), besides...
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