(1878–1967), American poet and biographer, whose six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln is considered a masterful interpretation of all the available material on the subject.

The son of Swedish immigrants, Sandburg was born on Jan. 6, 1878, in Galesburg, Ill. He left school at the age of 13 and became a day laborer. After serving in the Spanish-American War, he returned to Galesburg and put himself through Lombard (now Knox) College. In 1908 he married Lilian Steichen (1883–1977), sister of the American photographer Edward Steichen, and in 1913 they moved to Chicago. Sandburg first gained recognition when the poem “Chicago,” which appeared in the magazine Poetry in 1914, was awarded the Levinson Prize. Chicago Poems (1916), in which he used unrhymed free verse and the techniques of imagism, established his reputation as a realist who was concerned with industrial themes.

Sandburg wrote editorials for the Chicago Daily News from 1917 to 1933. During that period, he wrote such volumes of poetry as Cornhuskers (1918), Smoke and Steel (1920), and Good Morning, America (1928), all of which express a basic optimism for the future of America. His poetry gained wide appreciation for its impressionistic style and colloquial vigor.

Sandburg’s fame as a historian rests on his monumental works Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (2 vol., 1926) and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (4 vol., 1939; Pulitzer Prize, 1940). Sandburg felt that previous biographies of Lincoln had tended to idealize him to the point of unreality. Sandburg was also widely known as a singer of American folk songs, many of which he collected in The American Songbag (1927). Among his other works are Steichen the Photographer (1929), Home Front Memo (1943), the novel Remembrance Rock (1948), Complete Poems (1950; Pulitzer Prize, 1951), and the autobiography Always the Young Strangers (1953). He also wrote children’s books, including Rootabaga Stories (1922), and his collected letters were published in 1968. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he received its gold medal award for history in 1952 and for poetry in 1953. He was awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. Sandburg died on July 22, 1967.

His daughter, Margaret Sandburg (1911–97), edited The Poet and the Dream Girl: The Love Letters of Lilian Steichen and Carl Sandburg (1987). Another daughter, Helga Sandburg (1918–    ), wrote A Great and Glorious Romance: The Story of Carl Sandburg and Lilian Steichen (1978).