Карл Сэндберг: Жизнь и творчество американского писателя.

American writer and editor (1878–1967)

Carl Sandburg was born in a three room cottage at 313 East Third Street in Galesburg, Illinois, to Clara Mathilda (née Anderson) and August Sandberg, both of Swedish ancestry. He adopted the nickname "Charles" or "Charlie" in elementary school at about the same time he and his two oldest siblings changed the spelling of their last name to "Sandburg". At the age of thirteen, he left school and began driving a milk wagon. From the age of about fourteen until he was seventeen or eighteen, he worked as a porter at the Union Hotel barbershop in Galesburg. After that, he was on the milk route again for 18 months. He then became a bricklayer and a farm laborer on the wheat plains of Kansas. After an interval spent at Lombard College in Galesburg, he became a hotel servant in Denver, then a coal heaver in Omaha. He began his writing career as a journalist for the Chicago Daily News. Later, he wrote poetry, history, biographies, novels, children's literature, and film reviews. Sandburg also collected and edited books of ballads and folklore. He spent most of his life in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan before moving to North Carolina. Sandburg volunteered to join the military during the Spanish–American War and was stationed in Puerto Rico with the 6th Illinois Infantry, disembarking at Guánica, Puerto Rico, on July 25, 1898. Sandburg was never actually called to battle. He attended West Point for just two weeks before failing a mathematics and grammar exam. Sandburg returned to Galesburg and entered Lombard College but left without a degree in 1903. He then moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to work for a newspaper, and also joined the Wisconsin Social Democratic Party, the name by which the Socialist Party of America was known in the state. Sandburg served as a secretary to Emil Seidel, socialist mayor of Milwaukee from 1910 to 1912. Carl Sandburg later remarked that Milwaukee was where he got his bearings and that the rest of his life had been "the unrolling of a scene that started up in Wisconsin". Sandburg met Lilian Steichen (1883–1977) at the Milwaukee Social Democratic Party office in 1907, and they married the next year in Milwaukee. Lilian's brother was the photographer Edward Steichen. Sandburg with his wife, whom he called Paula, raised three daughters. Their first daughter, Margaret, was born in 1911. The Sandburgs moved to Harbert, Michigan, and then to suburban Chicago, Illinois in 1912 after he was offered a job by a Chicago newspaper. In 1945, he moved to Connemara, a rural estate in Flat Rock, North Carolina. Here, he produced a little over a third of his total published work and lived with his wife, daughters, and two grandchildren. On February 12, 1959, in commemorations of the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, Congress met in joint session to hear actor Fredric March give a dramatic reading of the Gettysburg Address, followed by an address by Sandburg. Sandburg supported the Civil Rights Movement and was the first white man to be honored by the NAACP with their Silver Plaque Award as a "major prophet of civil rights in our time." Sandburg died of natural causes in 1967 and his body was cremated. The ashes were interred under "Remembrance Rock", a granite boulder located behind his birth house in Galesburg.

Much of Carl Sandburg's poetry, such as "Chicago", focused on 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." Sandburg earned Pulitzer Prizes for his collection The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, Corn Huskers, and for his biography of Abraham Lincoln (Abraham Lincoln: The War Years).

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." 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 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. The books garnered critical praise and attention for Sandburg, including the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for History for the four volume 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." Historian 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. According to the musicologist Judith Tick:
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."

Sandburg said he considered working on D. W. Griffith's 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.

Carl Sandburg's boyhood home in Galesburg is now operated by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency as the Carl Sandburg State Historic Site. The site contains the cottage Sandburg was born in, a modern visitor's center, and small garden with a large stone called Remembrance Rock, under which his and his wife's ashes are buried. Sandburg's home of 22 years in Flat Rock, Henderson County, North Carolina, is preserved by the National Park Service as the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site. Carl Sandburg College is located in Sandburg's birthplace of Galesburg, Illinois. During the Spanish American War, Sandburg was stationed at Camp Alger in Fairfax County, Virginia and so the county has both a Sandburg Road, near the spot where the camp was located, and a Carl Sandburg Middle School. On January 6, 1978, the 100th anniversary of his birth, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp honoring Sandburg. The spare design consists of a profile originally drawn by his friend William A. Smith in 1952, along with Sandburg's own distinctive autograph. The Rare Book & Manuscript Library (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign) (RBML) houses the Carl Sandburg Papers. The bulk of the collection was purchased directly from Carl Sandburg and his family. In total, the RBML owns over 600 cubic feet of Sandburg's papers, including photographs, correspondence, and manuscripts. In 2011, Sandburg was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.

Carl Sandburg Village was a 1960s urban renewal project in the Near North Side, Chicago. Financed by the city, it is located between Clark and LaSalle St. between Division Street and North Ave. Solomon & Cordwell, architects. In 1979, Carl Sandburg Village was converted to condominium ownership. Numerous schools are named for Sandburg throughout the United States, and he was present at some of these schools' dedications. (Some years after attending the 1954 dedication of Carl Sandburg High School in Orland Park, Illinois, Sandburg returned for an unannounced visit; the school's principal at first mistook him for a hobo.) Sandburg Halls, a student residence hall at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, carries a plaque commemorating Sandburg's roles as an organizer for the Social Democratic Party and as personal secretary to Emil Seidel, Milwaukee's first Socialist mayor. Carl Sandburg Library opened in Livonia, Michigan, in 1961. The name was recommended by the Library Commission as an example of an American author representing the best of literature of the Midwest. Carl Sandburg had taught at the University of Michigan for a time. Galesburg opened Sandburg Mall in 1975, named in honor of Sandburg. The Chicago Public Library installed the Carl Sandburg Award, annually awarded for contributions to literature. Amtrak added the Carl Sandburg train in 2006 to supplement the Illinois Zephyr on the Chicago–Quincy route.