The Carl Sandburg Collection

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A selection of items from the Carl Sandburg Collection.
Photo courtesy of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The Carl Sandburg Collection

Rare Book and Manuscript Library

University Library

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

1408 West Gregory Drive

Urbana, IL

Website:  University Library: Rare Book and Manuscript Library

The Treasure:   The country’s most comprehensive collection of Sandburg materials, the Carl Sandburg Collection includes literary manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, newspaper clippings, audiovisual materials, and thousands of books.

Accessibility:  Researchers must register with the library before they may gain access to requested material. The Rare Book and Manuscript Library is open Monday through Friday from 8:30 to 5. There’s usually a changing exhibit highlighting material from the library’s special collections.

Background:  The honors poured in near the end of Carl Sandburg’s long life (1878-1967). On February 12, 1959, the 150th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, Sandburg addressed a special joint session of Congress on the legacy of the president whom he had celebrated in the acclaimed biography Lincoln: The Prairie Years (two volumes) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln: The War Years (four more volumes). In a rare honor for a private citizen, Sandburg spoke before both houses of Congress, offering a dignified and eloquent tribute to Lincoln. Here’s a brief snippet of Sandburg speaking that day:

But that probably wasn’t Sandburg’s favorite honor. By many accounts, he was particularly proud of the Silver Plaque Award that he received from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1965. This award recognized the importance of his years of work as an investigative reporter covering race relations in Chicago. During the extremely difficult times of the 1919 Chicago race riots, Sandburg drew upon his connections within the black community to honestly describe the root causes of frustration and anger. As with all the causes that he championed, Sandburg always stood on the side of working men, women, and children, with singular empathy for the country’s most vulnerable citizens.

Sandburg received a Grammy Award, too.  In 1959, he won a Grammy for “Best Performance – Documentary or Spoken Word” for his collaboration with the New York Philharmonic on Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait. This honor tied in nicely with his other longstanding musical achievement—he was one of the first people to attempt to document and compile American folk songs. His 1927 publication The American Songbag has been hailed by legendary folk singer Pete Seeger as a “landmark” work in the field.

But, above all, Sandburg was a poet. In his poetry, he pulled together all these threads—his love of history, his profound feelings for social justice, and his delight in the common vernacular and the music of the people—to express a singularly American vision.

THEY WILL SAY

     OF my city the worst that men will ever say is this:
You took little children away from the sun and the dew,
And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky,
And the reckless rain; you put them between walls
To work, broken and smothered, for bread and wages,
To eat dust in their throats and die empty-hearted
For a little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights.

Carl Sandburg

from Chicago Poems (1916)

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University Library’s preservation program led the large-scale project to ensure long-term preservation of the Carl Sandburg Collection. The work included mass deacidification, item-level deacidification, preservation photocopying, encapsulation, and conservation treatments. Audiovisual materials were reformatted digitally and in analog form.

A view of three of the many iterations of Sandburg's poem, The People, Yes.
Photo courtesy of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Other Recommended Sites:  There are two other major Sandburg historic sites to visit. The Carl Sandburg Birthplace and Visitor Center in Galesburg, Illinois preserves the historic house and provides plenty of background information at a neighboring museum and theater. In Connemara, North Carolina, the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site showcases the 264-acre farm where Sandburg settled down for the final 22 years of his life.

Carl Sandburg.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Tour America's History Itinerary

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© 2012 Lee Price