Sandburg was fortunate in gaining the support of Philip Green Wright, an English professor who printed Sandburg's first poetry collection, In Reckless Ecstasy (1904), on a basement press. In Milwaukee in 1907, while organizing the Wisconsin Social Democrat Party, Sandburg met Lillian "Paula" Steichen, his mate of nearly sixty years and mother of their daughters, Janet, Margaret, and Helga. During the period known as the Chicago Renaissance, he was secretary to Emil Seidel, Milwaukee's first socialist mayor, and then he took various writing jobs. During World War I, Sandburg served the Newspaper Enterprise Associates as Stockholm correspondent. Upon return, he wrote editorials for the Chicago Daily News and settled on Lake Michigan in Harbert, east of Chicago, and, in 1919, in Elmhurst.
Sandburg published his famous "Chicago" in 1914 in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, and produced pulsing, realistic verse set in America's urban industrial complex, which he idealized as a brusque, up-and-coming national treasure. His steady outpouring — Chicago Poems (1916), Corn Huskers (1918), Smoke and Steel (1920), Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922), Good Morning, America (1928), and The People, Yes (1936), which lauds the vigorous folk hero Pecos Bill — resulted in Complete Poems (1950), winner of the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. In addition, he staked out new territory with a cross-cultural collection of folk ballads, The American Songbag (1927). The work derives from his voice-and-guitar platform presentations. He also published a polemical memoir, The Chicago Race Riots (1919), three children's stories — Rootabaga Stories (1922), Rootabaga Pigeon (1923), and Potato Face (1930) — and an American saga, Remembrance Rock (1948), his only novel.
