Carl Sandburg

(1878 - 1967)

Having worked as a barbershop porter, milk-truck driver, brickyard hand, and wheat harvester, Carl Sandburg, at the age of twenty in 1898, enlisted in an Illinois infantry regiment to serve in the Spanish-American War. He published Chicago Poems in 1916; Good Morning, America in 1928; and his Pulitzer Prize–winning four-volume work of history, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, in 1939.