Acclaimed America's people's poet, Carl August Sandburg spoke directly and compellingly of the worker, a vigorous, enduring composite character who embodied Sandburg's free-verse portraits of democracy's inhabitants. Some audiences were bowled over by Sandburg's engagingly slangy phrasing and shadowy figures; the poet's massive correspondence linked him to the personalities of his day, including socialist Lincoln Steffens, actor Gary Cooper, President Lyndon Johnson, and editor Harry Golden, Sandburg's traveling buddy. Others, like Robert Frost, were repulsed by Sandburg's folksy affectation. Frost once described his contemporary as "the most artificial and studied ruffian the world has had." The description was not without merit.
Sandburg was born of Swedish ancestry in Galesburg, Illinois, on January 6, 1878. He was the son of a semiliterate laborer, rail blacksmith August Johnson, and Clara Anderson. His family chose the name Sandburg to separate them from a confusing neighborhood of Johnsons. Sandburg later boasted of the bold X that served his immigrant father as an honorable signature.
A restless vagabond, Sandburg ended formal schooling and his job as morning milk deliverer at age 13 to take other hands-on jobs, including bootblack, newsboy, hod carrier, kitchen drudge, potter's and painter's assistant, iceman, and porter at Galesburg's Union Hotel barbershop. For four months in 1897, he traveled the railroads and washed dishes at various hotels. After a brief residency at West Point in 1899, Private Charlie Sandburg fought for eight months in Puerto Rico with the Sixth Regiment of the Illinois Volunteers during the Spanish-American War. With the encouragement of an army comrade, he attended Lombard College for four years but quit before receiving a degree.
