Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) was born in Galesburg, Illinois, the son of an immigrant Swedish blacksmith. He is often considered the poet of America's common people. During his life he was a populist, journalist, folk singer, poet, and biographer. Sandburg left school after the eighth grade and held a variety of jobs until he was twenty, when he enlisted as a volunteer in the Spanish-American War. When he came home, he attended Lombard College in Illinois but left in 1902 without graduating. His poems were first published in 1904, the year he began his journalism career at the Galesburg newspaper. In 1914, some of his poems were published in the magazine Poetry, and two years later, his first book of verse was published. During these years he held a variety of political jobs and wrote editorials for the Milwaukee Leader and other newspapers. He wrote for the Chicago Daily News from 1922 to 1930.

Sandburg collected and wrote songs as well as poems and as a young man had traveled the United States reading his work and singing his songs to the accompaniment of a guitar. Always the Young Strangers (1952) is his autobiographical account of these early years. After World War II, he took his readings to the college campus circuit. He was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his Complete Poems (1950), and the other for his biography Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (1939). In later years, Sandburg enjoyed extraordinary acclaim. Several schools in Illinois were named for him, and he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. Sandburg wrote several children's stories. In addition to these and his books of biography, his works include Chicago Poems (1914), Cornhuskers (1918), Smoke and Steel (1920), Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922), and The People, Yes (1936). Sandburg also compiled collections of folk songs, most notably The American Songbag (1927).