Carl Sandburg — Ever The Winds of Change
American Poet & Biographer
Writing about John Drinkwater and his play Abraham Lincoln I am reminded of the American writer Carl Sandburg, whose biography of Lincoln —with the first two parts published in 1926 — is perhaps one the finest ever written of that most memorable and important of presidents.
That two part volume, called Abraham Lincoln — The Prairie Years, somehow changes the nature of biography — in the way Lytton Strachey did in 1918 with his Eminent Victorians — changing it by making it so much more personal, honest, unsentimental and down to earth: full of gossip and stories, and the smells and winds of the prairies, and the homes, and food, and getting an education, and knowing right from wrong pretty much from the day you were born. Sandburg’s writing is not the stiff wordage of, for instance, some writers in Lincoln’s time, but a much more poetic, steam generated kind of writing that never seems to slow for breath in its need to tell a story. The Third part, The War Years, was first published in 1939.
In the 26 February 1943 edition of John O’ London’s Weekly, the Irish dramatist, Conal O’ Riordan, wrote of Sandburg and Lincoln:
“ It is natural that Sandburg should have chosen Lincoln as a hero; for, though of Swedish origin, he himself is an Illinois man by birth, and it will be…
