Editing Carl Sandburg (section)

===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"/>