Carl Sandburg


Click the image to learn more. Photograph of Carl Sandburg sitting with his typewriter at his home in Illinois, circa 1917-1918.

Poet, journalist, novelist, and biographer of Abraham Lincoln, Carl Sandburg came to Wisconsin from Chicago in late 1907 to be a political organizer in rural Wisconsin for the state’s Social Democratic Party.[1] Sandburg rose rapidly among Milwaukee’s Socialists between 1908 and 1912 because of his enthusiasm for the local brand of socialism and his powerful oratory.[2] He worked on Emil Seidel’s mayoral campaign in 1910 and served as Seidel’s private secretary before returning to journalism.[3] To make a living while in Milwaukee, Sandburg wrote for the Social-Democratic Herald and the Milwaukee Leader as well as the Milwaukee Journal, Daily News, and Sentinel. He left Milwaukee in 1912.[4]

Footnotes [+]

  1. ^ North Callahan, Carl Sandburg: His Life and Works (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987), xiii.
  2. ^ Philip R. Yanella, The Other Carl Sandburg: A Portrait of the Radical Sandburg Before His Glory Days in the Pantheon of Popular Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), 9-10, 11-13; Penelope Niven, Carl Sandburg: A Biography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991), 186.
  3. ^ Yanella, The Other Carl Sandburg, 13-14.
  4. ^ Niven, Carl Sandburg: A Biography, 204, 229.

For Further Reading

Niven, Penelope. Carl Sandburg: A Biography. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991.

Yanella, Philip R. The Other Carl Sandburg: A Portrait of the Radical Sandburg before His Glory Days in the Pantheon of Popular Writers. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996.

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