The historical writings of Carl Sandburg were the most important twentieth-century factor in Abraham Lincoln's continuing popularity. Sandburg's massive Lincoln biography was an immediate sensation, and today's bookstores are likely to carry Sandburg's volumes on their shelves even if they contain no other book on Lincoln.

Sandburg, the son of Swedish immigrants August and Clara Mathilda Anderson Sandburg, was born and raised in Galesburg, Illinois. There Civil War veterans, old associates of Lincoln, and memorials to the Lincoln-Douglas debate which took place at Galesburg's Knox College, piqued Sandburg's interest in the sixteenth president. The youth left school after the eighth grade, took rough odd jobs, and rode boxcars. Service with the Sixth Infantry Regiment, Illinois Volunteers, in the Spanish-American War apparently gave him a taste for soldiering, for he was appointed to West Point. However, failing the military academy's entrance examination, he decided to go back to school...