Carl Sandburg – författare

Superb collection of poems by the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet. This collection of Sandburg’s finest and most representative poetry draws on all of his previous volumes and includes four unpublished poems about Lincoln. The Hendricks’s comprehensive introduction discusses how Sandburg’s life and beliefs colored his work and why it continues to resonate so deeply with americans today. Edited and with an Introduction by George and Willene Hendrick.

A long poem that makes brilliant use of the legends and myths, the tall tales and sayings of America. "If America has a folksinger today he is Carl Sandburg, a singer who comes out of the prairie soil... who can hand back to the people a creation that has scraps of their own insight, humor, and imagination" (Padraic Colum).

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) is best known for his poetry (Chicago Poems, Smoke and Steel, and Good Morning, America), his books for children, including Rootabaga Country and Potato Face, and his six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Illinois author devoted his life to writing, lecturing, reading from his own works, and collecting and singing folk songs.  Sandburg often incorporated proverbs, riddles, aphorisms, and vernacular wisdom in lectures, poetry, children’s stories, and in his novel Remembrance Rock. Believing that silliness and fun helped preserve sanity and balance, he put together a collection of fanciful anecdotes - alive with alliteration - for his own amusement. Now, more than twenty years after his death, the publication of Fables, Foibles, and Foobles truly reveals, for perhaps the first time, the playful spirit of this great American poet.  George Hendrick has compiled the best of these never-before-published nonsensical pieces, which include Flies, Fleas, Flinyons, Flicks, Flooches, Flacks, Flatches, and assorted F-friends deep in dialogue about books and reading; the fascinating worlds of the curious hoomadooms, hongdorshes, and onkadonks; fables to rival Thurber; jokes about every conceivable type of nut; and cameo appearances by Hank the Honk and Flitty the Wid, among others. Robert Harvey’s whimsical drawings, scattered throughout the book, illuminate this charming cast of characters.

Now considered possibly Illinois' greatest poet, Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) saw himself as a bard of the working class. Chicago Poems brought him to national attention and is one of the few Chicago classics that can also be termed an American classic. It includes such famous poems as "Chicago" and "Fog," as well as many others whose subjects range from the lives of ordinary citizens to city scenes and World War I. Written in powerful free verse, the poems are notable for their realistic portrayal of the struggle of working people and their focus on the lyric beauty of the urban environment.

Now published for the first time, Ever the Winds of Chance is Sandburg's evocative sequel to Always the Young Strangers (1953), "the best autobiography ever written by an American" (Robert E. Sherwood, New York Times). Though left unfinished at his death, the sequel provides a wry, nostalgic chronicle of Sandburg's college years and early adulthood, a restless decade for a young man still in quest of his calling.Ever the Winds of Chance opens in 1898 when the twenty-year-old Sandburg, recently returned from the Spanish-American war, enrolls at Lombard College in his native Galesburg, Illinois. Sandburg writes about his job at the fire station; his teachers, inspired or otherwise; his classmates and their camaraderie; his observations on great literary works and writers; and his own writings for the school newspaper, literary review, and yearbook and for the Galesburg Mail. But he also includes much about life between school years and after college, recounting his various brief careers as a fireman, salesman of stereoscopic views, advertising copywriter, vagabond, "jailbird," and budding poet and socialist. Together these reminiscences provide an intimate look at the formative years of a preeminent figure in American letters.

"These letters reveal the thoughts of two fine, strong minds drawn to each other first by their interest in socialism, then by their love of poetry and a similarity of ethics and ideals. My mother recognized this in his early prose and poetry. They learned so much about each other from these letters, yet it seems extraordinary that there was so little personal contact."-- From the introduction by Margaret Sandburg

This volume presents nearly 250 of Lincoln's most important speeches, state papers, and letters in their entirety. Here are not only the masterpieces,the Gettysburg Address, the Inaugural Addresses, the 1858 Republican Convention Speech, the Emancipation Proclamation,but hundreds of lesser-known gems. Alfred Kazin has written that Lincoln was "not just the greatest writer among our Presidents . . . but the most telling and unforgettable of all American'public' writer-speakers," and it's never been cleaner than in this comprehensive edition.