Abraham Lincoln

The prairie years, by carl sandburg.

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Abraham Lincoln by Carl Sandburg

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This definitive, single-volume edition of the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography delivers “a Lincoln whom no other man . . . could have given us” (New York Herald Tribune Book Review).

Celebrated for his vivid depictions of the nineteenth-century American Midwest, Carl Sandburg brings unique insight to the life of Abraham Lincoln in this distinguished biography. He captures both the man who grew up on the Indiana prairie and the president who held the country together through the turbulence and tragedy of the Civil War.

Based on a lifetime of research, Sandburg’s biographywas originally published as a monumental, six-volume study. The author later distilled the work down to this single-volume edition that is considered by many to be his greatest work of nonfiction.

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Abraham Lincoln

  • The Prairie Years and The War Years
  • By: Carl Sandburg
  • Narrated by: Arthur Morey
  • Length: 44 hrs and 12 mins
  • 4.7 out of 5 stars 4.7 (1,666 ratings)

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Publisher's summary

Originally published in six volumes, which sold more than one million copies, Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln was praised as the most noteworthy historical biography of Sandburg’s generation. He later distilled this monumental work into one volume that critics and readers alike consider his greatest work of nonfiction, as well as the most distinguished, authoritative biography of Lincoln ever published.

Growing up in an Illinois prairie town, Sandburg listened to stories of old-timers who had known Lincoln. By the time this single-volume edition was competed, he had spent a lifetime studying, researching, and writing about our 16th president. His extraordinary portrait brings fully to life the country lawyer who would become one of the most influential and beloved presidents of the American republic. Additional information about the author can be found at: http://www.nps.gov/carl.

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  • Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 48
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In 1860, Charleston, South Carolina, embodied the combustible spirit of the South. No city was more fervently attached to slavery, and no city was seen by the North as a greater threat to the bonds barely holding together the Union. And so, with Abraham Lincoln's election looming, Charleston's leaders faced a climactic decision: They could submit to abolition - or they could drive South Carolina out of the Union and hope that the rest of the South would follow.

Madness Rules The Hour ...once more

  • By Anonymous User on 05-06-21

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What listeners say about Abraham Lincoln

  • 4.5 out of 5 stars 4.7 out of 5.0
  • 5 Stars 1,334
  • 4 Stars 232
  • 5 Stars 1,192
  • 4 Stars 229
  • 5 Stars 1,236
  • 4 Stars 177

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Audible.com reviews, amazon reviews.

  • Overall 4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance 4 out of 5 stars
  • Story 4 out of 5 stars

Profile Image for Sohachi

A moving tale of a very human man

I have read several Lincoln biographies, including Doris Kearns Goodwin's very good one, but this one gave me much more of a sense of Lincoln, the man. There were many of his jokes, many instances of his interactions with ordinary people, so many stories of his kindness and understanding of human nature. I didn't realize when i bought the book that it was 44 hours long. To my great surprise, I finished it in about ten days, listening four or five hours a day because I was so interested. There were a few stories about Mary Todd Lincoln's difficult behavior that revealed her illness and his constant generosity and understanding. I also liked Sandberg's references to how Lincoln's speech sounded. I am almost certain that he would never be elected today, as he would be dismissed as an ignorant hick. From previous biographies, I knew that Lincoln was shot on April 14. When Grant defeated Lee at Appomattox on April 9, I realized the end was near. I kept hoping (knowing it was ridiculous) that Lincoln would decide to stay in that Friday. The stories of some of the things he did that day were heartbreaking, and so very kind. For example, he met a widow with four children whose husband's pension hadn't been paid for months. He promised to personally take care of it the next day. She wept in gratitude, and I wonder if she ever got that pension. The national train ride of mourning was so well written that I felt the nation's love and sorrow. One shortcoming, I felt, was that other than the moments and hours after the shooting, Sandburg provided no quotes or insight into the reactions of Lincoln's wife and sons. I wondered what it was like for them to accompany his (eventually decomposing) body around the nation. In the midst of their grief and horror, I wonder if the solidarity of the crowds was comforting, exhausting or both. Often during the book, as Lincoln's decisions were reviewed, frequently very unfavorably, by his contemporaries, I wondered how long it takes to get a fair perspective on history. This was a beautifully written and narrated book, and it will inform my view of Lincoln and American history forever.

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71 people found this helpful

  • Overall 5 out of 5 stars
  • Story 5 out of 5 stars

Profile Image for Joseph

No Spoiler Alert

Yes, we all know how the story ends. But this significant book (44+hours) was well worth the listen. Carl Sandburg tells the story of Abraham Lincoln in a way that had me feeling like I knew the man. I learned the good, bad and completely unexpected about Mr. Lincoln, his beliefs, his relationships, his humour and the amazing times in which he lived. Arthur Morey was a wonderful narrator, balancing his delivery and dialects in a measured, respectful and, I thought, unbiased way. The ending was sad because it felt like I had lost a friend.

63 people found this helpful

  • Performance 5 out of 5 stars

Profile Image for William

Sandburg, the master wordsmith

What made the experience of listening to Abraham Lincoln the most enjoyable?

Realizing the gravity of whom the biography was written and who wrote it; both giants in their place in our history.

What did you like best about this story?

That it revealed the common themes of our politics then and now. It also emphasized how close the Union came to dissolution.

What about Arthur Morey’s performance did you like?

Arthur Morey was steadfast - it was a long book - that he brought remarkable sound to the written words of Sanberg.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

I have a long commute and confess that I drove with wet eyes more than a few times.

27 people found this helpful

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Any additional comments?

Written by Carl Sandburg, narrated by Arthur Morey, a very long audiobook - over 44 hours of listening. Although originally released way back in 1954, this audiobook format was released in 2013. Two American legends. One, Carl Sandburg - poet, author. The other, Abraham Lincoln. This alone should tell you this book is a pretty decent listen. Predominantly a history of the United States from the late 1700s through the end of the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln is also recommended for anyone interested in an understanding of Lincoln, the man. Abraham Lincoln is a compilation of Sandburg’s decades of research. The book is filled with Lincolnesque homily, often disconnected, one line insights as an attempt to convey Lincoln, his time, character, friends, enemies, and Lincoln’s humble roots. Typical of the writings of the time, the prose is wordy and some would say verbose. Starting with details about Lincoln’s heritage, his grandfather also being an Abraham Lincoln, his father Tom, the brief life of his mother Nancy Hanks, the book traverses Lincoln’s life, election, presidency, the American Civil War, through his ultimate assassination in April of 1865. Narration by Arthur Morey is superb. It’s apparent that Morey admired Sandburg’s writing and Abe himself. If you are interested in the preeminent insight into Lincoln, an in-depth look at his foibles and amazing intellect, this read is a must. It is also an excellent American history lesson. Enjoy!

23 people found this helpful

Profile Image for Angus Davis

  • Angus Davis

This is by far and away the best biography I have ever read. It is not in the least smarmy-the principal failing of most biographies I've read. It presents a wealth of fact, largely leaving it to the reader to draw their own conclusions. The facts often cast Lincoln in a bad light, but this only contributes weight and substance to the portrait of a very great man. And that is the book's principal merit, it reveals in its fullness, with poetry and pathos, the astonishing genius of Abraham Lincoln.

12 people found this helpful

Profile Image for Elizabeth

I never truly understood what an amazing human being our 16th president was

This was a much appreciated listen and very moving. It's too bad that more politicians don't try to emulate President Lincoln. But I think there have been very few such extraordinary people who have risen to our highest political office. This book has had a dramatic impact on me. I most highly recommend it. It was very well read.

11 people found this helpful

  • Overall 3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance 3 out of 5 stars

Profile Image for Weston Buckhorn

  • Weston Buckhorn

Bizarre pronunciations of common words

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

It is the only audio book of Carl Sandburg's six volume Pulitzer prize winner which I have read three times so I was compelled to buy it. The book is not on trial in my review, it is Arthur Morey. Is Mr. Morey an American? There were so many affected pronunciations that I suspected Morey learned the American dialect as a second language. How can anyone pronounce the name Rosecrans with three syllables? He says "Roze-ah-kranz" instead of "Roze-kranz" like he started to pronounce the name and had to stop in the middle of it, insert an "ah" before he remembered the last syllable. There are many more examples. Secondly, I suspect this book is abridged, not unabridged as advertised. I could not find the vignette about the blind soldier that Lincoln met in his carriage in Washington.

Who was your favorite character and why?

There is only one character in a six volume biography of Abraham Lincoln.

Did Arthur Morey do a good job differentiating all the characters? How?

He did a good job, professional but not top tier. His pronunciations (Englander?) are distracting but do not ruin the performance.

What else would you have wanted to know about Carl Sandburg’s life?

Nothing. I do not care about his wife's goats, his kiddie books, crappy guitar playing,lousy singing, and mediocre poetry; what did do was write a magnificent biography of Abraham Llincoln. He could of died after "The War Years" was published in 1939 as far as I am concerned. Well, he did write the poem "Chicago" but that was before the Lincoln biography.

I wish I could prove this book is abridged, but my copy of "The Prairie Years" and " The War Years" was ruined by flood.

8 people found this helpful

Profile Image for Erik Cottrell

  • Erik Cottrell

I'll hardly be able to describe the immense work here but I loved this from start to finish. Thank you.

7 people found this helpful

Profile Image for Jeff

Listen to the Book, period!

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

What was one of the most memorable moments of Abraham Lincoln?

This is The definitive history of Abraham Lincoln written as writers used to write and by a master. No matter how familiar you are with the life and times of Lincoln, listen to/read this book.

  • Story 3 out of 5 stars

Profile Image for david ortega

  • david ortega

Now I know Lincoln

I am curious about his sources but assume most are cited somewhere. After 40-something hours of Lincoln I feel I have a much better grasp of the time and Lincoln himself. Also can't help but to draw comparisons to our current political climate and think maybe things aren't so different (aside from an actual war).

6 people found this helpful

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abraham lincoln biography by carl sandburg

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Lincoln as War Leader

abraham lincoln biography by carl sandburg

W ith these four volumes Carl Sandburg completes the life of Lincoln begun in “The Prairie Years.” Taking the total achievement, there is nothing in historical literature that I know quite comparable with it.

I generally distrust the meeting of perfect writer and perfect theme. There is a blueprint seemliness about such conjunctions that rarely issues in a creative product. The surprising thing ahout Sandburg writing on Lincoln is that in this case the results are good: the democrat, the poet, the story-teller, the earthy Midwesterner, the singer of the peepie has managed somehow to write about another democrat who was also something af a paet in his way and a vast story teller and an earthy Midwesterner and a product of the papular mass. He has sought to depict him on a canvas broader than anything else in American biography: Over 2,000 pages of text, hundreds of illustrations, a hundred pages of index. Even the four-volume Beveridge “Marshall,” expanded by long discussions ef cases and decisions, seems dwarfed. Sandburg has brought to his theme a brooding vigor and compassion, a precision of detail, a lyricism, a gusto for people and experience, that would be hard to match among American writers. And the work he has given us is not only a biography of Lincoln and a history of the Civil War. It is itself a battlefield, a sprawling panorama of people and issues and conflicts held together only by Sandburg’s absorption with the central figure.

The historian’s art has been narrowed by the academies to the point of making people believe that there is only one right way of setting down a history. Sandburg’s way is as characteristically his own as Carlyle’s was when he wrote of Cromwell. It is the right way for him because through it he can best express his own basic drives and outlook. He is in these books three things: reporter, poet, lover.

As reporter he sets down what happened with the athletic matter-of-factness that the best journalists put into their craft. But it is a reporter who has a million and a half words at his disposal, and so Sandburg empties his notebooks into his pages. But while nothing is too minute to he put in, there are no superfluous interpretations. The facts are allowed to speak for themselves, yet almost always they are so arranged (with a simplicity that almost conceals the cunning) that they do speak and have something to say. And Sandburg has the reporter’s passion for concreteness. We always learn the exact numbers of everything, the exact look of everyone who enters the story. There is something even a bit frightening ahout the detail. I think I can understand Sandburg’s intent: the Lincoln literature has grown so vast that a definitive factual work was needed to gather together everything available and valid. The result has one great flaw: the sense one gets of a curious one-dimensional plane, in which the detail gets the same loving attention as the big event, at a considerable sacrifice of perspective. Sandburg is a little like a painter in the primitive style. He is your true democratic historian. In his universe all facts, once they have been validated, are free and equal. Yet he gives his material thereby an unforced character that should cause the biographers who come after him to bless him. Unless I miss my guess, Sandburg’s Lincoln will become an inexhaustible storehouse from which will be drawn a myriad of other Lincolns.

There is also Sandburg the poet. A poet turning to biography and history is likely to flaunt his Muse or, by an inversion, to be ashamed of it and suppress it. Not Sandburg. The America of Lincoln, the teeming years of suffering and battle and greatness, lie drenched in the moonlight of his lyricism. The Sandburg here is the Sandburg of the Chicago poems, celebrating America and the obscure ways of life, setting his words down with neither elegance nor precision but with a curious random obliqueness that nevertheless manages almost always to reach its object. “Out of the smoke and the stench, out of the music and violet dreams of the war, Lincoln stood perhaps taller than any other of the many great heroes.” Thus Sandburg. What biographer who was not Sandburg’s kind of poet would dare say “music and violet dreams” when describing war, or juxtapose “violet dreams” with “the smoke and the stench”? Yet while there are passages verging on the dithyrambic, particularly at tlie end of chapters, the whole tone of the book has a quietness and restraint that only one who has mastered his subject and is sure of it could afford.

I have mentioned Sandburg the lover. I know of no other word that will describe the twelve years spent in wooing tlie material, the care lavished on every detail; or the complete identification with the subject that allows him to analyze Lincoln without once raising his voice in shrillness, and with the effortlessness of what might almost be an introspective reverie. Nor do I know of any other word to describe the deep and shrewd tenderness for common people throughout the book, such as one might expect from the author of “The People, Yes.”

Sandburg has evidently taken care not to write the sort of contemporary book that underlines the parallels between yesterday and today. He has given us Lincoln the man, Lincoln the war President, America in the war years. If there are morals to be drawn for today, he has left it to us to draw them.

I am not averse to drawing my own. But one does not need the stimulus of the modern instance to find excitement in the task of human interpretation that every Lincoln biographer has faced. Sandburg’s Lincoln stands out not for its sharpness of thesis but for its very lack of the monistic view. It has a catholicity and an unforced quality that are rare in biography, without succumbing to mere straddling and the colorless. One gets the external man and the internal tensions. There is no attempt to prettify, to play down crudities and failings; neither is there any hint of exploiting them. All the lumbering awkwardness of the man is there, his gropings and fumblings, the way he entered the reception room at the White House and made people feel he was the man in the room who was least at home. But the simplicity of the man is also there— a simplicity which, in Emerson’s phrase about him, was “the perfection of manners.”

Throughout the book we find ourselves on the verge of the symbolic. To quote Emerson again on Lincoln: “He exerts the enormous power of this continent in every hour, in every conversation, in every act.” Sandburg spells that out in detail, while he never lets us lose the sense of the symbolic relation between Lincoln and the American energies. And he manages also to convey Lincoln’s tortured sense that there had been imposed on him a task too great for human to bear. It is here that one strikes the deepest chord in Lincoln. The fatality of it: that he, with his tenderness for everything living, should become the instrument of death for tens of thousands; that he, who always saw the danger of men’s control over men, should have in his hand the destinies of millions; that he, who always shrank from action, should at the peril of his people be galvanized into a train of actions with vast inscrutable consequences. From this standpoint there are two peaks in the book: the chapter on Lincoln’s laughter and religion, and the analysis of how Lincoln had to tell his stories in order to relieve the intolerable tensions within him; and the chapters on the assassination and the country’s mourning. To the latter especially Sandburg brings his most complete gifts, telling the story with the subdued reverence of a passion play, and with a fatality as if the actors were moving in a dream. Here one reaches great writing.

It is a bit of luck for us that these volumes should appear just when the question of the conduct of the war by democracies is so much in our minds. One will not find here, as in the Baker volumes on Wilson, much discussion of the now frayed theme of American neutrality. But there is a store of stuff on the question of what happens to a democracy when it goes to war.

Lincoln has gone down in American history as one of the “strong” Presidents, who flouted constitutional restrictions and established a dictatorship in order to win the war. The view is not without its truth. Yet never has a government waged as fierce a war as Lincoln had to wage, and departed so little from the democratic spirit. Lincoln the war President, Lincoln the Commander-in-Chief of the national armies, Lincoln who suspended habeas corpus when it seemed an indispensable measure and who backed up the arrest and expulsion of Vallandigham by General Burnside—that Lincoln never ceased to be also Lincoln the humanist and Lincoln the democrat. He was sore pressed as no American President has ever been. He made mistakes, but as one reads the Sandburg volumes they seem to have been mainly on the side of excessive tolerance rather than lust for power. He had to deal with all the plagues that beset a war government — the militarist mind, the messianic mind, the bureaucratic mind; with war passions and hysteria, with patrioteers, with the lynching spirit, with lethargy, with an opposition so bitter it verged continually on sabotage and treason. He had no genius for organization, little capacity for delegation, little administrative ability as it is generally understood. But with all these limitations he never once lost sight of the main chance. He had a way of cleaving to the heart of a problem that baffled subtler and more expert and sophisticated minds. There were men around him with more powerful wills, men with a greater commitment to humanitarian and radical values. But there was no one who saw better than Lincoln the dilemma and task of a democracy at war; how to win the war with the minimum sacrifice of traditional liberties and democratic values.

In a world in which the leaders of war democracies are the Daladiers and Chamberlains and Churchills, we have reason to be proud of Lincoln. We have reason to be proud that with every opportunity for setting up a dictatorship, he did not succumb; with every opportunity for betraying democratic values under the guise of war necessity, he did not succumb. Long before the end of the war he was giving his best thought to the problem of a humane peace and a constructive plan for rebuilding the defeated states. I have no intention of saying that Lincoln was wholly consistent in the strength of his humanism. There were forces in American life that proved too powerful for him, for the cause of the North was tied up with the cause of a predatory capitalism, and the Reconstruction that followed Lincoln’s death was almost arid of either democratic or human values. Yet there was never a time when it was more important for us than now to know the capacity of a democracy to turn up greatness of Lincoln’s sort from its humblest sons — a greatness that will survive tlie grime and savagery of war.

If I read my own Lincoln somewhat into Sandburg’s pages, there is room for others as well. He has given the coming generations the material out of which to construct a myriad of Lincoln images. All the material is there — from the day that Lincoln boarded the train at Springfield to ride to his inauguration, down to the day when his coffin was placed in a flower-heaped vault in the Springfield he had left. What four years were crowded between those two boundaries! The hordes of people, office-seekers, handshakers; the jokes and stories, deep, illimitable stories, lighting up what was comic and contradictory in life; the grim wild humor of a President-elect conferring with his advisers as to how he might travel through Baltimore on his way to his inauguration without being lynched; the Cabinet officers, with their intrigues and jealousies; the vast decisions and petty details; the generals, and the heartbreaking search for military leadership that would be confident and firm and aggressive; the violent attacks in Congress and the press; the drama of emancipation, and the harrowing uncertainty of its consequences; Father Abraham; the see-sawing of war’s fortunes; the draft riots, the desertions, the Copperheads; the unending delegations of politicians and ministers and zealots and cranks; Jay Cooke and the financing of the war; the profiteering and poverty, at one extreme costly furs bought with war profits, at the other the starving families of soldiers; the European diplomats and statesmen puzzled by this ungainly fellow who told crude stories; the faith of the masses, growing and deepening every year; the rows of hospital cots, the faces pleading and rebuking; the dream of sudden death and the deep inner conviction that it would come; the unerring course of Booth’s bullet; Whitman’s threnody; the grief of the people. And then the legend.

My Journey Through the Best Presidential Biographies

My Journey Through the Best Presidential Biographies

Review of “Abraham Lincoln: The War Years” by Carl Sandburg

24 Saturday May 2014

Posted by Steve in President #16 - A Lincoln

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Abraham Lincoln , biographies , book reviews , Carl Sandburg , presidential biographies , Presidents , Pulitzer Prize

WarYears

“The War Years” was a monumental effort which earned Sandburg, already a well-known American poet and an increasingly well-regarded biographer, the 1940 Pulitzer Prize in history. Like Lincoln, Sandburg was a son of the Illinois prairie and as a consequence he harbored a lifelong interest in the sixteenth president. Sandburg died in 1967 at the age of 89.

Unlike Sandburg’s “The Prairie Years” which covered Lincoln’s childhood and early career as a lawyer and politician, “The War Years” does not have the sprightly, effervescent feel of a biography written by a poet. Instead, this series is heavy and more dense and only sparingly reveals its author’s normal passion for verse and dexterity.

Like its predecessor volumes, “The War Years” is mostly – but not strictly – chronological. Periodic interruptions in the flow allow the author to explore cultural or political topics which could probably be placed nearly anywhere in the series.  But unlike Sandburg’s coverage of Lincoln’s first fifty-two years in “The Prairie Years” which consumed more than nine-hundred pages, this series covers just four years of Lincoln’s life in nearly three times more pages. As a result, “The War Years” is heavy on details – both important and trivial – and requires an immense investment of time.

Unfortunately, while most of the big picture moments will strike the reader as familiar, much of the surrounding detail will not. A casual reader will often get lost in unimportant details and miss the forest for the trees. On more than one occasion I lost track of which part of Lincoln’s life was being discussed since the text wandered so deeply into one topic or another that previously familiar terrain became unrecognizable. Matters which might be dispatched with a paragraph, or perhaps a page, are routinely covered in ten or twenty pages.

On the other hand, with such breadth and depth Sandburg is able to provide insight into topics rarely found in other Lincoln biographies. For example, the reader is introduced more thoroughly to the Confederate Cabinet and its provocative personalities than anywhere else I’ve ventured. I’ve also never witnessed a more complete description of the drudgery of Lincoln’s day-to-day life as President (with innumerable requests for patronage, pardons or other favors).

The congressional plot against Secretary of State Seward is particularly interesting and the chapter describing Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox is unrivaled. In addition, this series provides the most thorough and dramatic account of Lincoln’s assassination that I’ve yet read. Covering more than 100 pages, Sandburg’s description of Lincoln’s last moments provides a fascinating and engrossing conclusion to the series.

With several hundred illustrations, photographs, notes, newspaper clippings and caricatures there is a great deal to be found in Sandburg’s biography that adds unique color and clarity to Lincoln’s story. Unfortunately, the text itself leaves Lincoln two-dimensional and his relationship with his family largely unexplored. For reasons unknown, Sandburg seems determined to avoid humanizing Lincoln, his wife or his children (none of whom become familiar after this lengthy series).

Also missing are observations or analyses by the author which would provide special insight into matters of great historical significance or serve to explore Lincoln’s legacy. Little or no overarching commentary examines Lincoln’s views on slavery, religion or other big-picture topics of interest. Although valuable messages and insights are contained in the series, they are widely scattered and well-hidden beneath mountains of minutiae.

Overall, Carl Sandburg’s “The War Years” is an encyclopedic recounting of Lincoln’s day-to-day life as president during a time of great conflict and turmoil. Though likely of great interest and value to a historian, the series will prove overwhelming and esoteric for a more casual reader. Although it is a jewel of American history, Sandburg’s biography does not distinguish between the trivial and the momentous. Impressive in scope, it is equally overwhelming and without enough moments of clarity and revelation to be of interest to the modern reader.

Overall rating: 3 stars

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4 thoughts on “review of “abraham lincoln: the war years” by carl sandburg”.

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May 28, 2014 at 8:49 pm

That was a Herculean effort. You’re a better man than I am. I have an abridged version of Sandburg’s multi-volume work, and still haven’t taken the plunge to read it. But for those interested in Sandburg’s efforts, it might be more manageable (and sane).

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May 29, 2014 at 5:26 am

Agreed – I began to wonder why I hadn’t read his condensed version when I was about three volumes in. Someday I might have to read the abridged work to see whether it is less tedious and more potent than the much longer original series.

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April 12, 2022 at 6:51 am

The abridgment was written after the Lincoln Papers were released and is thus far more than your typical abridgment. In my opinion, readers should put their ‘modern’ perspectives on a book’s length aside and read CS. Despite the academic’s and their quibbles regards the Chicago Style Manual, CS captures the spirit of the time and the man. Oh and you’ll find DKG’s ‘rivals’ thesis in the mouth of Congressman Dawes virtually verbatim. And true to form you’re not going to find Dawes cited in Team of Rivals.

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April 13, 2023 at 1:13 pm

Having read at least three dozen Lincoln books (bios and critical essays), I stumbled upon a free copy of the one-volume Sandburg bio/history, combining the pre- and post- Civil War years. It is an elegantly told account, long on some details and sparse on in-depth analysis. A co-reading of “Team of Rivals” would fill in many gaps in the Civil War sections. Yes, Sandburg’s volume is definitely the work of a poet, with the role of meticulous historian coming in second place.

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Sandburg's Lincoln within History

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Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and The War Years is, for better or worse, the best-selling, most widely read, and most influential book about Lincoln. Edmund Wilson, in Patriotic Gore , writes of how Grant's memoirs used to grace American bookshelves. "The thick pair of volumes of the Personal Memoirs ," he wrote, "used to stand, like a solid attestation of the victory of the Union forces, on the selves of every pro-Union home." [1] In my own childhood, several generations after Wilson's, the six slate-colored volumes of Sandburg's Lincoln occupied the same place of honor, celebratory not so much of Union victory as of the uniting of the country under the heroic figure of Lincoln.

The two volumes of The Prairie Years were the publishing event of 1926, and the four volumes of The War Years were an equal success in 1939. The books have been through many editions, including versions of a one-volume edition that Sandburg prepared in 1954. They have also provided the basis for a great many adaptations for various media, including Robert Sherwood's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Abe Lincoln in Illinois in 1938 and David Wolper's six-part dramatization for television, Sandburg's Lincoln , in 1974, starring Hal Holbrook. Probably more Americans have learned their Lincoln from Sandburg than from any other source. [2]

Sandburg's book has had an enormous impact on popular conceptions of Lincoln. In 1998, seventy-two years after the publication of its first part, it may seem to have aged rather badly: inaccurate factually, grotesquely distended, and lapsing rather too frequently into a dated and forced "prose poetry" that charms less now than over seventy years ago. Page  [End Page 55]

Maybe enough time has passed for us to see The Prairie Years and The War Years in historical perspective, to historicize it against the background of American history between the world wars. Sand-burg began writing The Prairie Years in 1922, less than five years after the World War I Armistice, and he completed The War Years in 1939 as the world was sliding inexorably into the holocaust of World War II; the ambiguity of his title did not escape him. Read as a timeless masterpiece, Sandburg's Lincoln does not hold up; read as a timely response to a series of national crises that recalled the Civil War, the book still carries much of its original power.

I would like to approach a historical reading of Sandburg's Lincoln gradually by first looking at it from three partial perspectives, each of which reveals part of the truth about the book. I do not have thirteen ways of looking at this blackbird, but I do have three: as a biography, an American epic, and an American myth. Then I would also like to look at the book from a fourth perspective, which perhaps engages its historical context more directly: as an American testament, a secular analogy of scripture designed to provide inspiration for Americans as they endured trials that to Sandburg's mind recalled the testing of the Civil War.

Most obviously, Sandburg's Lincoln is a biography of Lincoln. Sandburg himself thought of it as a Lincoln biography, at least most of the time, and that is the way that it has been read for the most part. Yet from the beginning, critics have pointed out that if it is a biography at all, it is a very eccentric and unconventional one. When The War Years appeared, the noted historian Charles Beard praised it as "a noble monument to American literature" but found it distinctly odd as historical biography: "Never yet," he wrote, "has a history or biography like Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln: The War Years appeared on land or sea. Strict disciples of Gibbon, Macaulay, Ranke, Mommsen, Hegel, or Marx will scarcely know what to do with it." [3] William E. Barton, who had published a life of Lincoln himself the year before The Prairie Years was published, wrote that Sandburg's book "is not history, is not even biography" because of its lack of original research and uncritical use of evidence, but Barton nevertheless thought it was "real literature and a delightful and important contribution to the ever-lengthening shelf of really good books about Lincoln." [4] Milo Milton Quaife, in Page  [End Page 56] the Mississippi Valley Historical Review , was not so generous. In one of the harshest evaluations of the book, he attacked Sandburg's failure to document his sources, his "naive conception of what constitutes evidence," and his "carelessness of statement." He cited nine factual errors in four pages on the Black Hawk War and wondered if the rest of the book was similarly inaccurate. The Prairie Years , he wrote, was nothing but "a hodge podge of miscellaneous information." [5]

Historians have continued to criticize Sandburg's free and easy way with his sources and his failure to identify those sources ever since, not only in The Prairie Years but in The War Years as well. He did provide a list of "Sources and Acknowledgments" at the opening of The War Years , but it is so brief and general as to be almost useless. He does identify many of his sources in the text of the works, and the reader who is reasonably familiar with the Lincoln literature is likely to recognize many of the rest of the sources. Unfortunately, such a reader is likely to recognize such unreliable or even fictional sources as the anonymous Diary of a Public Man and Francis Grierson's Valley of Shadows , which were drawn on as if they were authoritative.

A different, though related, charge against The Prairie Years and The War Years is that they contain too much material that is neither biography nor history but merely rather sentimental poeticizing on Sandburg's part. Quaife was as hard on this aspect of The Prairie Years as he was on the careless scholarship. He was especially scornful of what Sandburg called the "moonlight chapters," sections in which he sketched in the historical context of Lincoln's life by imagining what the moon might have seen at the time. "Whatever else it may be," Quaife snorted, it is "not history." [6] Sandburg's "poetical" interpolations were also the butt of Edmund Wilson's famous attack on the book, first in The New Yorker and then in Patriotic Gore . Wilson found Sandburg's treatment of Lincoln's romance with Ann Rutledge particularly hard to stomach. He cited Sandburg's line, "A trembling took his body and dark waves ran through him sometimes when she spoke so simple a thing as, 'The corn is getting high, isn't it?'" Wilson's comment was, "The corn is getting high indeed!" [7] Page  [End Page 57]

One critical strategy, faced with the uneasy blend of history and poetry in Sandburg's Lincoln , has been to abandon the claim to biographical accuracy and instead see the book as a large-scale national poem, perhaps an American epic. This is the view taken by, among many others, Penelope Niven, author of the massive and authoritative 1991 Carl Sandburg: A Biography."Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years," she writes, "is a vast, epic prose poem, with Lincoln the central figure in the volatile pageant of nineteenth-century American life. A man and a nation simultaneously came of age, for Lincoln grew into manhood as his country faced its own great crisis of character and destiny." [8] It is also essentially the view that Robert W. Johannsen takes in his wonderfully warm and sympathetic 1978 essay on "Sandburg and Lincoln: The Prairie Years." He frames Sandburg as a romantic historian rather than an epic poet, but the two are very similar in Johannsen's formulation. The Prairie Years , he writes, quoting Sandburg approvingly, "was a 'poem of America, the America of humble folk and rough pioneers, of crude settlements ... of the corn lands and broad prairies ... a poem of the human spirit, not Lincoln's spirit only.'" [9]

Sandburg himself saw his book as an American epic as often as he thought of it as a mere biography. In a preface written for The Prairie Years but dropped before publication, he wrote, "The facts and myths of his life are to be an American possession, shared widely over the world, for thousands of years, as the tradition of Knute or Alfred, Laotse or Diogenes, Pericles or Caesar, are kept." [10] And in his "symphonic finish" to The War Years , Sandburg wrote, "Out of the smoke and stench, out of the music and violent dreams of the war, Lincoln stood perhaps taller than any other of the many great heroes. This was in the minds of many. None threw a longer shadow than he. And to him the great hero was The People. He could not say too often that he was merely their instrument." [11] In this and in many similar passages, the figure of Lincoln becomes merged with that of Sandburg's favorite abstraction, The People, and the book becomes a democratic epic celebrating not an individual but a collective hero. Page  [End Page 58]

The oxymoronic term democratic epic foregrounds the weakness of the interpretation of The Prairie Years and The War Years as "epic" in any interestingly complex way. It is true that they are vast and sweeping in scale and national in spirit. The problem with an epic reading of Sandburg, however, is with the nature of the hero. To place The Prairie Years and The War Years in a series that begins with the Iliad and the Odyssey and continues with the Aeneid and Paradise Lost is to connect it with an aristocratic and individualistic tradition that Sandburg sharply critiques in Lincoln . The critique takes the form of a pervasive ambivalence on the subject of Lincoln's heroism, an ambivalence that appears in the conclusion to The War Years quoted earlier; on the one hand, Lincoln "stood perhaps taller than any other of the many great heroes," and on the other, to Lincoln himself, the great hero was "The People." (Niven and Johannsen register this ambivalence also, in Niven's identification of Sandburg's hero as not only Lincoln but also "the nation" and Johannsen's identification of him as both Lincoln and "the human spirit.")

A reading of Sandburg's Lincoln within the epic tradition might end by placing him not in a series with Achilles, Odysseus, and Aeneas but rather with Blake's Albion, Whitman's Walt, and Joyce's Leopold Bloom, as antiheroic heroes, collective individualists, and bourgeois aristocrats, in other words, within the paradoxical tradition of democratic epic heroes.

The Prairie Years and The War Years have also been read not as biography or as an epic poem but as a mythic text of American popular culture. Placed not in a series that includes Herndon's, Randall's, and David Herbert Donald's biographies of Lincoln or in one that includes the Iliad and the Odyssey , but rather, in a sequence that includes "Rip Van Winkle," Uncle Tom's Cabin , and Gone with the Wind , literary works, in other words, that provide or express some of the foundational myths of our culture, myths, in these examples, of gender, race, and the South. [12] The fullest reading of Sandburg's Lincoln from this point of view is perhaps found in Stephen B. Oates's Abraham Lincoln: The Man Behind the Myths . Oates concludes his survey of Sandburg's work by writing the following: Sandburg's Lincoln has such irresistible appeal to us [because] he is "a baffling and completely inexplicable" hero who em- Page  [End Page 59] bodies the mystical genius of our nation. He possesses what Americans have always considered their most noble traits—honesty, unpretentiousness, tolerance, hard work, a capacity to forgive, a compassion for the underdog, a clear-sighted vision of right and wrong, a dedication to God and country, and an abiding concern for all. [13] There is much that is persuasive about Oates's mythic reading of Sandburg's book, as there is about the readings of the book as biography and epic poem. Certainly Sandburg's Lincoln perpetuates a number of myths and stereotypes (and, incidentally, creates a few of its own). But, like the biographical and epic readings, Oates's pop-culture reading raises several questions. First, it seems remarkably innocent on Oates's part to believe that a popular audience would be attracted by such a Sunday School paragon as he describes. He seems to have given us a Lincoln for an audience of Tom Sawyers rather than the Huckleberry Finns that most of us actually are. Some consultation of recent studies of the interaction of readers with popular texts, such as Janice Radway's Reading the Romance , would have considerably complicated and enriched Oates's speculations. [14]

A more important point, however, is not whether readers want the sort of goody-goody Lincoln that Oates describes but rather whether this is the sort of Lincoln that Sandburg presents. And the answer must be a qualified "no." In the light of Oates's caricature of the book, it is interesting that its early reviewers saw it not as mythologizing but as demythologizing, a realistic portrait of a previously sentimentalized man. Harry Hansen, in his review of The Prairie Years in 1926, wrote the following: Out of the pages of this book emerges no heroic figure, no epic character, no titan towering above puny men. This is the book of the railsplitter, of the country storekeeper, the young lawyer, the frontier advocate, the practical backwoods politician.... The danger to the Lincoln legend was not from those who tried to make him less than he was; it came from those who were erecting him into a god of the new Augustan age of Page  [End Page 60] American commercial expansion. Lincoln was a human being of contradictions, faults and qualities. [15]

"Realism" is, of course, a subjective and time-bound quality, as anyone knows who has watched a presumably realistic film made twenty-five years ago. The Lincoln stereotypes of 1926 against which Sandburg seemed to be rebelling were not the stereotypes of the present, which are more likely to be the ones that Sandburg himself promulgated.

The definitive treatment of Lincoln as myth, at least for the time being, is Merrill D. Peterson's astonishingly exhaustive and perceptive 1994 book Lincoln in American Memory . Peterson adopts a rather static "images of Lincoln" theoretical framework, tracing five images through the voluminous texts, both verbal and nonverbal, in which Lincoln is memorialized: the savior of the Union, the great emancipator, man of the people, first American, and self-made man. [16] This scheme itself might be criticized for its overly simple conception of how audiences receive "images of Lincoln." It is as if idealization or wish fulfillment were the only process by which Americans perceive Lincoln. Other contemporary students of popular culture might see "Lincoln" not as a frozen image but as a site of cultural negotiation, in which cultural consumers construct Lincolns that satisfy multiply determined cultural needs. What seems to be left out of both Oates's and Peterson's formulations is the sort of wry, complex meditation on Lincoln that Charlie Citrine carries out in Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift . Citrine reflects that Lincoln is the exemplary American hero: "manic-depressive." [17]

Biography, epic, myth: All three ways of looking at Sandburg's Lincoln are partial. Each has a piece of the truth but fails to account for some features of this odd and idiosyncratic book. I would like to end by proposing another way of describing the book, as having what the critic Northrop Frye calls an "encyclopedic form." [18] Encyclopedic literary forms are characterized by their episodic, miscellaneous structures and by their panoramic, comprehensive visions of an entire culture. The principal encyclopedic text of our own culture is the Bible, with its composite structure of separate Page  [End Page 61] books written at different times and in different forms and with its sweeping, comprehensive vision of human life from creation to apocalypse. In modern times, encyclopedic texts tend to be what Frye calls "analogies of revelation," such episodic and yet visionary texts as James Joyce's Finnegans Wake , T.S. Eliot's Waste Land , and Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts . [19]

The general affiliations of Sandburg's Lincoln with encyclopedic texts are obvious in their loose, serial construction and their attempt to place Lincoln at the center of a vast, sweeping survey of American democratic civilization. In pointing out a few examples of these features, I should make it clear that I am referring to the entire six volumes of The Prairie Years and The War Years , as they were published in 1926 and 1939, and that occasionally I will refer to them separately, because in some ways, The Prairie Years and The War Years are separate works, organized and composed differently. Both are also different from the various abridgments that Sand-burg carved from them in later years. In these shorter versions, Sandburg tamed the wildness of his original text, trimming some of the ecstatic excesses of his American analogy of revelation. I want to look at Sandburg on the loose, in the full wildness of his extraordinary book.

A reading of Sandburg's Lincoln as an encyclopedic text is encouraged by some of Sandburg's own occasional descriptions of his work. In a letter in September 1937, to his friend and editor, Alfred Harcourt, for example, as he was preparing to turn the manuscript of The War Years over to the publisher, Sandburg wrote: "Sometimes I look at this damned vast manuscript and it seems just a memorandum I made for my own use in connection with a long adventure of reading, study and thought aimed at reaching into what actually went on in one terrific crisis—with occasional interpolations of meditations, sometimes musical, having to do with any and all human times." [20] And as early as fifteen years before, when he had just begun work on The Prairie Years , he had already begun to see the book as both a miscellany and an American secular testament: "Sometimes I think the Lincoln book," he wrote Harcourt, "will be a sort of History and Old Testament of the United States, a joke almanac, prayer collect, and compendium of essential facts." [21] Page  [End Page 62]

One of the surprises (and pleasures) of Sandburg's Lincoln is the unexpected twists and turns it takes as it unfolds its leisurely story. Chapter 66 of The Prairie Years , for example, is an account of the life cycle of corn, on no more pretext than that Lincoln passed a corn field on his way to his Springfield office. We hear of the plowing and the planting, the sprouting and the growing of the corn, the tassling, the forming of the ears, and their slow maturation. Then comes the harvest, the shucking, the shelling of the corn, and finally the fallow period of the winter: "Harvest time had come and gone. Afterward came the months when snow blew across the fields, and covered the stumps, and the fields were white and lonely." [22] In the long view, the description of the corn forms part of a metaphoric pattern in the book, but immediately, it is metonymic, included merely because the corn was there.

Similar interpolations are the list of jokes in Chapter 58 that Sandburg says Lincoln "might have told"; the list in Chapter 102 of commonplace cases that Lincoln tried, with no conclusion drawn except that "such were a few of the human causes, disputes, and actions in which Lincoln versed himself thoroughly" and the immensely protracted list of White House petitioners in Chapter 35 of The War Years . [23]

Reviewers noticed this aggregative quality of Lincoln , by which the book seems infinitely prolongable, merely by adding more lists, more random facts. Mark Van Doren wrote that "as Mr. Sandburg goes on he becomes drunk with data, and in true Homeric fashion compiles long lists of things." [24] Another reviewer thought that the book as "full of facts as Jack Horner's pie was full of plums." [25] Milo Milton Quaife said the same thing less tactfully: the book was "a literary grab bag," he wrote, "a hodge podge of miscellaneous information." [26]

The tone and the effect of the book are determined, to a large extent, by its odd combination of a mythologizing impulse and a great proliferation of detail. We think of myths as stark, bare, and timeless, not as embedded in the historical and the circumstantial. But the combination is perfectly consistent with Sandburg's inten- Page  [End Page 63] tion of writing an encyclopedic work, a "History and Old Testament of the United States," and perhaps we should relate Sand-burg's lists not so much to Homer and Little Jack Horner as to the roll calls and genealogies of the Old Testament.

The other feature of Sandburg's Lincoln that is illuminated by seeing the book in the encyclopedic tradition is its characterization of Lincoln. As we have seen, commentators have been sharply divided in their readings of Sandburg's representation of Lincoln. At one extreme is a reader such as Stephen Oates, who sees Sand-burg's Lincoln merely as a stereotype idealized beyond credibility; at the other extreme is one such as Harry Hansen, who thought that Sandburg had described a real person, "a human being of contradictions, faults and qualities." In fact, both Oates and Hansen are right; Sandburg's Lincoln alternates inconsistently between a believable human being and an abstraction, not, perhaps, the Christian saint of Oates's description, but something closer to a nature god, coterminous with the natural world and frequently on the point of dissolving back within it. The Prairie Years is especially thick with references of this sort. The boy Lincoln is compared with a growing stalk of corn: When he was eleven years old, Abe Lincoln's young body began to change. The juices and glands began to make a long, tall boy out of him.... As he took on more length, they said he was shooting up into the air like green corn in the summer of a good corn-year. So he grew. [27] The Illinois corn crop furnishes the central symbol for Lincoln's development and his near identity with nature in The Prairie Years . And not only the corn crop: At other times, Lincoln seems to be half tree: "He grew as hickory grows, the torso lengthening and toughening. The sap mounted, the branches spread, leaves came with wind clamor in them." [28]

Such passages are less frequent in The War Years . Lincoln biographers have always had trouble reconciling the Illinois and the Washington Lincoln. Sandburg's solution is to make The Prairie Years a comic pastoral and The War Years a tragedy. He also makes The Prairie Years relatively mythic and The War Years relatively realistic. I say "relatively" because Lincoln has a double nature throughout, oscillating between man and spirit, in line with Sand- Page  [End Page 64] burg's double intention both to depict a real person and a real crisis in American history and at the same time to make of that depiction an "analogy of revelation" of the American civil religion.

That Sandburg intends his Lincoln to be this kind of a secular scripture that would provide a spiritual inspiration for the country as it faced economic collapse and impending war is clear from the narrative of composition that unfolds in his letters. In 1935, for example, he wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt: "Having written for ten years now on 'Abraham Lincoln: the War Years,' starting this year on the fourth and final volume, I have my eyes and ears in two eras and can not help drawing parallels. One runs to the effect that you are the best light of democracy that has occupied the White House since Lincoln." [29] Readers of The Prairie Years and The War Years , too, might read with their "eyes and ears in two eras," not only the America of Lincoln's time but the America of Roosevelt's as well. Read in this stereoptical way, Sandburg's Lincoln might reveal to us the passion and the urgency that its first readers sensed in it three quarters of a century ago. Page  [End Page 65]

COMMENTS

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    "Abraham Lincoln: The War Years" is the second volume of Carl Sandberg's epic biography of Lincoln. It picks up with the trip to Washington and goes to the end of 1863. Author Carl Sandberg does an excellent job of weaving Lincoln's story into that of his times.

  4. Carl Sandburg

    Carl August Sandburg (January 6, 1878 - July 22, 1967) was an American poet, biographer, journalist, and editor. He won three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln.During his lifetime, Sandburg was widely regarded as "a major figure in contemporary literature", especially for volumes of his collected verse, including Chicago Poems (1916 ...

  5. Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years by Carl Sandburg

    Celebrated for his vivid depictions of the nineteenth-century American Midwest, Carl Sandburg brings unique insight to the life of Abraham Lincoln in this distinguished biography. He captures both the man who grew up on the Indiana prairie and the president who held the country together through the turbulence and tragedy of the Civil War ...

  6. Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and The War Years by Carl Sandburg

    Originally published in six volumes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln was called "the greatest historical biography of our generation." Sandburg distilled this work into one volume that became the definitive life of Lincoln. By gleaning every possible reference from history, literature, and popular lore ...

  7. Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years & The War Years (Six Volume Set)

    Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years/One-Volume Biography. Carl Sandburg. ... A two-volume labor of love by poet Carl Sandburg recalling Lincoln's years as a "country lawyer and prairie politician." It was in the foothills of Kentucky and the farm-country of Indiana and Mississippi that the future president learned about people ...

  8. Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years

    Carl Sandburg was an American poet, biographer, journalist, and editor. He is the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. During his lifetime, Sandburg was widely regarded as "a major figure in contemporary literature," especially for his volumes of collected verse, ...

  9. Abraham Lincoln : The Prairie Years and the War Years

    Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years. Carl Sandburg. Sterling Publishing Company, 2007 - Biography & Autobiography - 463 pages. Originally published in six volumes, which sold more than one million copies, Carl Sandburg's Pulitzer Prize winner Abraham Lincoln won praise as the most noteworthy historical biography of his ...

  10. Abraham Lincoln by Carl Sandburg

    by Carl Sandburg. This definitive, single-volume edition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography delivers "a Lincoln whom no other man . . . could have given us" (New York Herald Tribune Book Review). Celebrated for his vivid depictions of the nineteenth-century American Midwest, Carl Sandburg brings unique insight to the life of Abraham ...

  11. Carl Sandburg, the Biographer of Lincoln

    - Carl Sandburg, Milwaukee Daily News 1909. Sandburg often felt that he was fortunate to grow up in such a rich Lincoln area and that perhaps he would write a biography of Abraham Lincoln for young people that would give American children an opportunity to learn of Lincoln as he did. However, this book for young people had changed.

  12. Abraham Lincoln: The War Years

    Abraham Lincoln: The War Years encompasses volumes three through six of Carl Sandburg 's six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln; these volumes focus particularly on the American Civil War period. The first two volumes, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, were published in 1926 and cover the period from Lincoln's birth through his inauguration ...

  13. Abraham Lincoln by Carl Sandburg

    Publisher's summary. Originally published in six volumes, which sold more than one million copies, Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln was praised as the most noteworthy historical biography of Sandburg's generation. He later distilled this monumental work into one volume that critics and readers alike consider his greatest work of nonfiction ...

  14. Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years/One-Volume Biography

    Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years/One-Volume Biography Hardcover - December 31, 1899 by Carl Sandburg (Author) 4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 72 ratings

  15. Sandburg's Lincoln

    Sandburg's Lincoln. As a young boy growing up in Galesburg, Illinois, Carl Sandburg often listened to stories of old-timers who had known Abraham Lincoln. He would regularly take a shortcut through nearby Knox College in Galesburg where, on October 7, 1858, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas had met for the fifth joint debate in the famous ...

  16. Carl Sandburg on Abraham Lincoln as Civil War Leader

    Sandburg's Lincoln stands out not for its sharpness of thesis but for its very lack of the monistic view. It has a catholicity and an unforced quality that are rare in biography, without ...

  17. Abraham Lincoln: The War Years

    Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, four-volume biography by Carl Sandburg, published in 1939.It was awarded the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for history. After the success of Sandburg's 1926 biography, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, Sandburg turned to Lincoln's life after 1861, devoting 11 years to research and writing.The biography is informed not only by the author's journalistic style but ...

  18. Review of "Abraham Lincoln: The War Years" by Carl Sandburg

    "Abraham Lincoln: The War Years" is a four-volume, 2,400 page biography focused on Lincoln's presidency and death. Written by Carl Sandburg and published in 1939, it was published about a dozen years after Sandburg's two-volume "Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years" covering the first five decades of Lincoln's life. "The War Years" was a monumental effort which earned Sandburg ...

  19. Sandburg's Lincoln within History

    Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and The War Years is, for better or worse, the best-selling, most widely read, and most influential book about Lincoln. Edmund Wilson, in Patriotic Gore, writes of how Grant's memoirs used to grace American bookshelves."The thick pair of volumes of the Personal Memoirs," he wrote, "used to stand, like a solid attestation of the victory of the ...

  20. Abraham Lincoln (American Roots)

    Abraham Lincoln (American Roots) Hardcover - March 31, 2016. In February 1959, Carl Sandburg gave an address on the occasion of Abraham Lincoln's 150th birthday before the Joint Session of Congress. The Lincoln biographer spoke of the nation's 16th president as a man "who is both steel and velvet, who is as hard as rock and soft as drifting ...

  21. Carl Sandburg

    1939 - The four volumes of biography, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, are published. 1940 - Sandburg wins the Pulitzer Prize for history for Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. He is elected to ...

  22. Abraham Lincoln : The War Years : 4 Volume Set: Sandburg, Carl

    Hardcover - January 1, 1939. This four-volume set by Carl Sandburg encompasses more than 2,000 pages covering the War Years under President Abraham Lincoln. The work Sandburg has given us is not only a biography of Lincoln and a history of the Civil War. It is itself a battlefield, a sprawling panorama of people and issues and conflicts held ...

  23. Carl Sandburg (Author of Abraham Lincoln)

    January 06, 1878. Died. July 22, 1967. Genre. Poetry. edit data. Free verse poems of known American writer Carl August Sandburg celebrated American people, geography, and industry; alongside his six-volume biography Abraham Lincoln (1926-1939), his collections of poetry include Smoke and Steel (1920). This best editor won Pulitzer Prizes.