Sandburg was a lifelong collector of Lincolniana. He was living at Chickaming Goat Farm in Harbert while lecturing, collaborating with P. M. Engle on Mary Lincoln: Wife and Widow (1932), and completing a six-volume Life of Abraham Lincoln, composed of the two-part The Prairie Years (1926) and the four-part The War Years (1939). The work was a solid success, acquiring instant readership and universal admiration, and it won him the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for history and the Saturday Review of Literature award in history and biography. After numerous summers of touring to earn ready cash with recitations and folk songs plucked out on his banjo and guitar, Sandburg's last years brought the secure notoriety of the people's poet. He published memoirs of his coming of age in Always the Young Strangers (1953).
Following a crippling seizure in 1965, Sandburg inaccurately predicted that he would survive to a year divisible by eleven. He was bedridden his last two years, and he relied on his wife as spokesperson until his death at home from a second heart attack on July 22, 1967. He was eulogized at the nearby St. John in the Wilderness Episcopal Church; his and Paula's ashes are buried in Galesburg beneath Remembrance Rock.
