1878-1967
Poet

Origins.

Born on a corn-husk mattress in a three-room shack and raised in the prairie town of Galeburg, Illinois, Carl Sandberg, who early changed his name to the more American-sounding Charles Sandburg, was the restless son of semiliterate Swedish immigrants. Sandburg's name change was an early, visible sign of his desire to establish an American identity for himself and to explore the nature of Americanness: in fact, these lifelong preoccupations prepared him to become one of the foremost poetic voices of the 1930s, the decade with which he is most closely associated. Sandburg was only eighteen when wanderlust propelled him out of his rural town and toward Chicago in 1896 and then across the country as part of the stream of hoboes and tramps whose continent-wide odyssey in search of employment prefigured that of the railroad-hopping hoboes of the Depression. Sandburg's quest left him with...