Editing Carl Sandburg (section)

==Career==

===Poetry and prose===
[[File:RootabagaStories.jpg|thumb|left|''Rootabaga Stories'' (book 1, 1922)]]

Much of Carl Sandburg's poetry, such as "[[Chicago (poem)|Chicago]]", focused on [[Chicago|Chicago, Illinois]], where he spent time as a reporter for the ''[[Chicago Daily News]]'' and ''[[The Day Book]]''. His most famous description of the city is as "Hog Butcher for the World/Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat/Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler,/Stormy, Husky, Brawling, City of the Big Shoulders."

[[File:Sandburgs four volume work on Abrham Lincoln.png|thumb|Sandburg's biography of Lincoln]]

Sandburg earned [[Pulitzer Prize]]s for his collection ''The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg'', ''Corn Huskers'', and for his biography of [[Abraham Lincoln]] (''[[Abraham Lincoln: The War Years]]'').<ref Name="Pul"/> Sandburg is also remembered by generations of children for his ''[[Rootabaga Stories]]'' and ''Rootabaga Pigeons'', a series of whimsical, sometimes melancholy stories he originally created for his own daughters. ''The Rootabaga Stories'' were born of Sandburg's desire for "American fairy tales" to match American childhood. He felt that the European stories involving royalty and knights were inappropriate, and so populated his stories with skyscrapers, trains, corn fairies and the "Five Marvelous Pretzels".

[[File:4646 N. Hermitage Ave.JPG|thumb|left|Sandburg rented a room and lived for three years in this house, where he wrote the poem "Chicago". It is now a Chicago landmark.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.chicago.gov/content/dam/city/depts/zlup/Historic_Preservation/Publications/Carl_Sandburg_House.pdf |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221009/https://www.chicago.gov/content/dam/city/depts/zlup/Historic_Preservation/Publications/Carl_Sandburg_House.pdf |archive-date=2022-10-09 |url-status=live |title=Carl Sandburg House|date=October 4, 2006|publisher=City of Chicago Department of Planning and Development, Landmarks Division|access-date=August 28, 2019}}</ref>]]

In 1919, Sandburg was assigned by his editor at the ''Daily News'' to do a series of reports on the working classes and tensions among whites and [[African Americans]].  The impetus for these reports were race riots that had broken out in other American cities. Ultimately, [[Chicago race riot of 1919|major riots]] broke out in Chicago too, but much of Sandburg's writing on the issues before the riots caused him to be seen as having a prophetic voice. A visiting philanthropist, [[Joel Spingarn]], who was also an official of the [[National Association for the Advancement of Colored People]], read Sandburg's columns with interest and asked to publish them, as ''The Chicago Race Riots, July, 1919''.<ref>{{Cite news |url=https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-flashback-chicago-race-riots-carl-sandburg-20190718-lh3xtxuf3nc4bhttja6dcf6epi-story.html |title=Flashback: Before Chicago erupted into race riots in 1919, Carl Sandburg reported on the fissures |last=Grossman |first=Ron |date=July 19, 2019 |work=Chicago Tribune  |access-date=July 21, 2019}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |url=https://archive.org/details/chicagoraceriots00sand |title=The Chicago Race Riots July, 1919 |last=Sandburg |first=Carl |publisher=Harcourt, Brace and Howe |year=1919 |location=New York |access-date=July 21, 2019}}</ref>

===Lincoln works===
Sandburg's popular multivolume biography ''Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years'', 2 vols. (1926) and ''Abraham Lincoln: The War Years'', 4 vols. (1939) are collectively "the best-selling, most widely read, and most influential book[s] about Lincoln."<ref name="Hurt">{{cite journal |last1=Hurt |first1=James |title=Sandburg's Lincoln within History |journal=Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association |date=Winter 1999 |volume=20 |issue=1 |pages=55–65 |doi=10.5406/19457987.20.1.05 |hdl=2027/spo.2629860.0020.105 |url=https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/2629860.0020.105/--sandburg-s-lincoln-within-history|hdl-access=free }}</ref> The books have been through many editions, including a one-volume edition in 1954 prepared by Sandburg.

Sandburg's Lincoln scholarship had an enormous impact on the popular view of Lincoln. The books were adapted by [[Robert E. Sherwood]] for his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, ''Abe Lincoln in Illinois'' (1938) and [[David Wolper]]'s six-part dramatization for television, ''Sandburg's Lincoln'' (1974). He recorded excerpts from the biography and some of Lincoln's speeches for [[Caedmon Records]] in [[New York City]] in May 1957. He was awarded a [[Grammy Award]] in 1959 for [[Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album|Best Performance – Documentary Or Spoken Word (Other Than Comedy)]] for his recording of [[Aaron Copland]]'s ''[[Lincoln Portrait]]'' with the [[New York Philharmonic]]. Some historians suggest more Americans learned about Lincoln from Sandburg than from any other source.<ref>Niven, Penelope, ''Carl Sandburg: A Biography'' (New York: Scribner's, 1991), p. 536.</ref>

The books garnered critical praise and attention for Sandburg, including the 1940 [[Pulitzer Prize for History]] for the four-volume ''[[Abraham Lincoln: The War Years|The War Years]]''. But Sandburg's works on Lincoln also received substantial criticism.  [[William E. Barton]], who had published a Lincoln biography in 1925, wrote that Sandburg's book "is not history, is not even biography" because of its lack of original research and uncritical use of evidence, but Barton nevertheless thought it was "real literature and a delightful and important contribution to the ever-lengthening shelf of really good books about Lincoln."<ref>Barton, William E., "Review of The Prairie Years," ''American Historical Review'' 31 (July 1926): pp. 809–11.</ref> Historian [[Milo Quaife|Milo Milton Quaife]] criticized Sandburg for not documenting his sources and questioned the accuracy of ''The Prairie Years'', noting they contain a number of factual errors.<ref name="Hurt"/> Others have complained ''The Prairie Years'' and ''The War Years'' contain too much material that is neither biography nor history, saying the books are instead "sentimental poeticizing" by Sandburg.<ref name="Hurt"/> Sandburg himself may have viewed his works more as an American epic than as a mere biography, a view also mirrored by other reviewers.<ref name="Hurt"/>

===Folk music===

Sandburg's 1927 anthology the ''[[American Songbag]]'' enjoyed enormous popularity, going through many editions; and Sandburg himself was perhaps the first American urban folk singer, accompanying himself on solo guitar at lectures and poetry recitals, and in recordings, long before the first or the second folk revival movements (of the 1940s and 1960s, respectively).<ref>Malone, Bill C., and David Stricklin (2003). ''Southern Music/American Music'' (University Press of Kentucky, 2003), p. 33.</ref> According to the musicologist [[Judith Tick]]:
<blockquote>As a populist poet, Sandburg bestowed a powerful dignity on what the '20s called the "American scene" in a book he called a "ragbag of stripes and streaks of color from nearly all ends of the earth ... rich with the diversity of the United States." Reviewed widely in journals ranging from the ''New Masses'' to ''Modern Music'', the ''American Songbag'' influenced a number of musicians. Pete Seeger, who calls it a "landmark", saw it "almost as soon as it came out." The composer Elie Siegmeister took it to Paris with him in 1927, and he and his wife Hannah "were always singing these songs. That was home. That was where we belonged."<ref>Tick, Judith, ''Ruth Crawford Seeger, A Composer's Search for American Music'' (Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 57.</ref></blockquote>

===Film===
Sandburg said he considered working on [[D. W. Griffith]]'s ''[[Intolerance (film)|Intolerance]]'' (1916) but his first film work was when he signed on to work on the production of ''[[The Greatest Story Ever Told]]'' (1965) in July 1960 for a year, receiving an "in creative association with Carl Sandburg" credit on the film.<ref>{{cite magazine|magazine=[[Variety (magazine)|Variety]]|title=Carl Sandburg on 20th's 'Greatest'|date=July 6, 1960|page=24|url=https://archive.org/stream/variety219-1960-07#page/n23/mode/1up|access-date=February 6, 2021|via=[[Archive.org]]}}</ref>