Carl Sandberg was an American poet and Biographer. He was born in Galesburg, Illinois in 1878. Sandbergs parents had imigrtated to the United States from Sweden before he had been born. At the young age of 13, he left school to become a day laborer. Sandberg served in the Spanish-American War in 1898 when he was 20. When his service was over, he returned to Galesburg to work his way through Lombard college (now known as Knox College.) In 1913, at age 35, Sandberg moved to Chicago. His first recocnized poem appeared in 1914, in Poetry and was titled "Chicago." He won the magazine's Levinson Prize that year for "Chicago." This was to be the first success of many for Sandberg in the world of poetry. Some of his other successes included Complete Poems , which earned the Pulitzer Prize in 1951, the year after it was published, Smoke and Steel (1920), Cornhuskers (1918), and Good Morning, America (1928). Even though Sandberg was a excellent poet, he gained most of his fame through the 6-volume biography on Abraham Lincoln called Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years ,2 volumes published in 1926, and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years ,4 volumes published in 1939, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1940. He died in 1967 at age 89.