“I see America not in the setting sun of a black night of despair…
I see America in the crimson light of a rising sun fresh from the burning, creative hand of God,” wrote poet Carl Sandburg, who died JULY 22, 1967.
A son of Swedish immigrants who worked on the railroad, Sandburg left school after 8th grade, borrowed his father’s railroad pass and traveled as a hobo.
He volunteered for military service, was sent to Puerto Rico in the Spanish-American War, and then attended college on a veteran’s bill.
Carl Sandburg wrote children’s fairytales, called Rootabaga Stories, and mused of his wanderings in American Songbag.
Carl Sandburg wrote:
“A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.”
In 1926, he wrote Abraham Lincoln-The Prairie Years, and in 1939 he wrote Abraham Lincoln-The War Years, for which he received a Pulitzer Prize.
In 1959, Sandburg was invited to address Congress on Lincoln’s birthday.
In his Complete Poems, for which he won a Pulitzer, 1951, Carl Sandburg wrote:
“All my life I have been trying to learn to read, to see and hear, and to write.
At sixty-five I began my first novel…
It could be, in the grace of God, I shall live to be eighty-nine…I might paraphrase:
‘If God had let me live five years longer I should have been a writer.'”
Carl Sandburg wrote:
“When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from.”
William J. Federer is a nationally known speaker, best-selling author, and president of Amerisearch, Inc., a publishing company dedicated to researching America’s noble heritage.
To learn more about the author please visit William Federer
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