There have been thousands of writers in America but only a choice few were gifted enough to have been immortalized over time. Carl Sandburg was one of those writers. He not only wrote hundreds of poems and stories, but he also won many awards and helped spark a style of writing in the 20th century. His writings have had a huge impact on American literature when he was alive, and it is still continuing today.
Carl Sandburg was born on January 6th, 1878 in Galesburg, Illinois. His was the son of August and Clara Sandburg. He died in his Flat Rock home in North Carolina on July 22, 1967. He lived to be 89 and it is so funny that he lived to be that exact age (Lisa Lee 1, 4). In his prologue to Complete Poems, he said "All my life I have been trying to learn to read, to see and hear, and to write. At sixty-five I began my first novel, and the five years lacking a month I took to finish it, I was still traveling, still a seeker .It could be, in the grace of God, I shall live to be eighty-nine, as did [the Japanese poet] Hokusai, and speaking my farewell to earthly scenes, I might paraphrase: "If God had let me live five years longer I should have been a writer." It is such a coincidence that he wanted to live to be eighty-nine and he did (Penelope Niven 4).
Sandburg was a very successful writer. Before he started to write his poetry, he was a journalist in Milwaukee and later moved to Chicago where he didn't miss a beat with his journalism career. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1939 for his four-volume sequel, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. He won another Pulitzer Prize in 1950 in poetry for his collection of poems called Complete Poems.
Along with his burning desire to write poetry, he also loved to sing old folk songs. He was not taught to play the guitar, he merely learned the hard way: lots of practice. The songs he liked most were the "hobo" songs because he claims that he was a ""bo" himself.