thieves, and hoboes that took one road, then another, found one day and lost another, worked for a dime, worked for a meal, and possessed a proud dignity because they endured when the odds had given them up for dead.
Carl said he left home with his hands free, “no bag or bundle, wearing a black sateen shirt, coat, vest, and pants, a slouch hat, good shoes and socks, no underwear, in my pockets a small bar of soap, a razor, a comb, a pocket mirror, two handkerchiefs, a piece of string, needles and thread, a Waterbury watch, a knife, a pipe and a sack of tobacco, three dollars and twenty-five cents in cash.” He considered himself a well-dressed hobo until the rains, dust storms, and railroad yards left his clothes as wrinkled and forlorn as his life.
His father scowled as he watched the boy walk away. His mother cried.
The road traveled in only one direction. It never brought anyone back. It would go forever or end at the edge of the earth. As he wrote: “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.”
The education of Carl August Sandburg had begun. His teachers would become the great unwashed, the common man in common places, mostly with uncommon ideas.
He rode the rails, slept in train yards or fifteen-cent flophouses, watched the cities come and go, saw the countryside change from mountains to wheat fields, then fall away in the long shadows of thick forests.
The rails and the rivers led him on, always on, and he did not know where they would take him, or if they would take him anywhere at all. Carl chopped wood, picked pears and apples, had a fight or two, was thrown off a few trains, saw the inside of a jail cell from time to time, and shared coffee, stale bread, and burnt frankfurters with those huddled masses who warmed the campfires of a hobo jungle. They came from all parts of a struggling country, asking for little, expecting even less.
He listened to their voices, their stories, their hopes, their anger, and the hurt that dwelled deep inside their souls. Long before he realized it, their trials and their tribulations had become part of his own.
Twice he fell asleep while riding the bumpers of a train.
Twice he almost died. Many lay in unmarked graves along the side of the road, their names lost, their faces forgotten, their ambitions turning to ashes and dust. It was as though they had not traveled the road all.
Gone like the winds or the tides without anyone to mourn them.
Carl could have been one of them.
It could have turned out far different.
He wrote: “I was meeting fellow travelers and fellow Americans. What they were doing to my heart and mind, my personality, I couldn’t say then nor later and be certain. I was getting a deeper self-respect than I had had back home in Galesburg (Illinois) . . .
“What had the trip done to me, I couldn’t say. It had changed me … Away deep in my heart now I had hope as never before. Struggles lay ahead, I was sure, but whatever they were I would not be afraid of them.”
Carl still had no idea what to do with himself. Words and lines of free verse were forming in his brain. He had no idea what to do with those either. Why write them down? Who would ever read them?
He tried one trade, then another, and none really appealed to him. Carl drove a milk truck, sandpapered houses for a painter, and borrowed every book he could find to read.
While the burning, splintered remnants of the battleship Maine lay scattered upon the ocean, he enlisted in the army simply because President McKinley had declared war.
Carl wound up in Cuba by the time the fighting had ended. His was not a bloody tour, he said, but a dirty, lousy affair all the same. Long marches. Hard roads. Fifty-pound backpacks. Never-ending rains. Mosquitoes with blood on their faces, his blood. And graybacks in his uniform.
Carl stood tall during the most miserable and demanding of times and impressed his commanding officer so greatly that, with only an eighth grade education, he was nominated as a candidate for West Point.
That’s where his life changed for good.
Carl was still smitten with his “endless unrest.” He had spent years looking for a trade, a vocation, even a profession, and he remained on a hard, shadowed road that was leading him from one dead end to another.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he began to concoct the idea that maybe he had the ability to put a pen and ink to paper and write. His free verse read like prose, his prose like poetry, full of strength and emotion.
The common man did not read poetry.
The common man would read Carl Sandburg.
It was as though he looked at the world through their eyes.
As his granddaughter said, “In his work, he turned often to the jargon of the people about which he wrote. His most poetic images and phrasing would not seem alien to a store clerk or a steelworker.”
But he wrote alone, preferred the quiet of the night, and remained a vagabond in search of himself. Carl bought bananas for a dime a dozen and a loaf of stale bread for a nickel.
He lived and ate simply. He traveled the back roads on a rented bicycle, pedaling from farm to farm and peddling stereoscopes throughout Wisconsin. Winding roads. Never ending.
As restless as always.
But the job did give him the freedom to wander alone and think, to sit beneath the trees in the shank of the day and read, to linger at roadsides and write all kinds of formal verse. The poems were not so good he always said, “but I had the lingering, and that was good.”
The lingering would never leave him. His curious journeys had shaped him. The common man molded him. He read so many words along the way, and finally he began to put his own words on paper. He wrote them his way, free and unstructured, powerful and filled with imagery that came from the mind and emotion of a man who saw America at its best, at its worst, and forgot nothing. It was his own style. He fit no other.
It could have turned out far different.
At the end of that unpredictable and circuitous road, Carl Sandburg found pen and paper and finally an old typewriter. He worked on newspapers and magazines, sat down and wrote the Rutabaga Stories for children, and, during the quiet solitude of a long night, began writing the free verse of his poetry.
He had possessed the soul of a poet all along.
Although a few holier than thou historians said that a poet’s pen should never meddle with history, Carl wrote the six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln, which may well be the finest biography of them all.
His were the stories of a man, a President, and an age. He told his publisher that he thought the Lincoln book might be “a sort of history and Old Testament of the United States, a joke almanac, prayer collection, and compendium of essential facts.”
The final four volumes, The War Years, contained more than 1.75 million words, more than the Bible or the complete works of William Shakespeare.
His Lincoln biography, which took almost two decades to research and write, earned Carl Sandburg his first of two Pulitzer Prizes.
Carl Sandburg wrote with his old typewriter mounted atop an
