Poet, journalist, and historian Carl Sandburg was one of the most famous literary figures of the 20th century. Born in Galesburg, Illinois, to Swedish immigrant parents, he left home in his early teens and supported himself by digging potatoes, harvesting wheat, blacking stoves, and working on railroads and steamboats. The rural and urban laborers he encountered shaped many of the themes and images in his poetry. He published his first book of poetry, In Reckless Ecstasy, in 1904, later moved to Milwaukee, and married Lillian Steichen, sister of photographer Edward Steichen. In 1912, the family moved to 4646 North Hermitage Avenue, where Sandburg began writing for the Chicago Daily News and wrote the poem "Chicago," whose opening lines include "Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler" and "City of the Big Shoulders." His early collections included Chicago Poems (1916) and Smoke and Steel (1920). His free verse, lacking regular rhyme or metrical pattern and scattered with street-corner slang and anecdotes, helped usher in an era of poetic modernism. Sandburg also wrote a six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln; its last volume won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1940, his Complete Poems won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1951, and he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.
