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Celebrating the Legendary Carl Sandburg

Celebrating Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg (January 6, 1878–July 22, 1967) was an American poet, writer, and editor who won three Pulitzer Prizes, two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. He was widely regarded as a major figure in contemporary literature for his volumes of verse, including Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), and Smoke and Steel (1920).

By the time Sandburg and his wife Lillian moved to Western North Carolina in 1945, the Illinois native, former hobo, and champion of the ‘working man’ had already achieved international fame. During the remaining 22 years of his life at their Flat Rock home, Sandburg produced a little more than a third of his total published works. But the family was perhaps best known and remembered by their neighbors for Lillian’s prize-winning herd of goats.

Sandburg is also remembered by generations of children for his Rootabaga Stories and Rootabaga Pigeons, a series of whimsical tales he created for his own daughters who lived with the family at Flat Rock.

Connamara, their 246-acre rural estate and Greek revival summerhouse built in 1839, is now a National Historic Site, and a fitting memorial to one of the nation’s most revered and prolific writers.

In connection with the celebration of the National Park Service centennial this year, Flat Rock-resident Richard Labunski has produced an eight-minute video for the Friends of Carl Sandburg at Connemara. It features Sandburg’s granddaughter, Paula Steichen Polega, who lived at Connemara as a child, talking about her life there and reading one of his poems. It can be seen at friendsofcarlsandburg.org.

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