I admit to choosing most of the books I read randomly. That will explain how I just finished reading Harry Golden’s biography of Carl Sandburg, called appropriately Carl Sandburg.
When I think of Harry Golden (something I do every twenty years or so), I think of him as the editor of The Carolina Israelite, a newspaper I have never read, or the author of Only in America, and You’re Entitle, two books I have never read. I think of a curmudgeon, although I have no idea if he was curmudgeonly at all, and a man smoking a cigar, although I had no idea if he smoked anything at all (it turns out he did smore or xhew on cigars). I did know he wrote from the perspective of a Jew living in North Carolina, fairly unusual at the time, but I did not know he was raised in New York City, was a stockbroker indicted for embezzling client funds, and that he served four years in prison after being convicted before being pardoned by President Nixon.
When I look up Golden in Wikipedia, I see he wrote about 30 books on a variety of topics, largely on the promise of America, Jews’ place in America, and the problem of segregation in the south.
What these three topics have in common is that they are all about this country, and about the uniqueness of this country. So maybe it isn’t surprising that Golden wrote a book about Carl Sandberg. What may be more surprising is that Golden and Sandberg were close friends. And that Sandburg wrote the preface to at least one of Golden’s books.
Carl Sandburg is not at all about Harry Golden. It is not at all about Jews in America. It is only about Carl Sandburg, a writer, historian, biographer, poet, and musician whom Golden portrays as being as American as anyone coukd possibly be.
Sandburg grew up in Galesburg IL, had a fairly typical smallish town Midwest childhood, I guess, but left home at a young age and became a hobo (to be distinguished from a vagrant, a tramp, or a bum), riding the rails across the country, stopping here and there for the odd job. He became a socialist, a champion of the “lower” classes, enrolled in college but did not graduate, and started on a peripatetic career, earning keep as a journalist, but writing and occasionally publishing poetry as the years went by. He gained recognition, especially through his Chicago poems, began to be in demand to speak and recite his poetry, and he always brought with him a guitar or banjo, and played and sang American folk music. Then, he capped his career by writing a massive 6 volume biography of Abraham Lincoln, The Prairie Years and The War Years. Interestingly, he collected material about Lincoln throughout his adult life, but when he started writing Lincoln’s biography, he thought he would write a book for children. But gmhe got carried away.
Golden’s book itself is not a standard biography as much as a collection of anecdotes, some short, somewhat long, all interesting, which when woven together present a good picture of Sandburg. It is a very evocative picture and makes for an interesting book to read. It is like you are looking at the many notes of a biographer before he puts them into standard narrative form. And when he describes how Sandburg put together his Lincoln volumes, you see some similarity of process.
I wouldn’t call this book a hagiagraphy, although the book does not concentrate on Sandburg’s shortcomings, whatever they might be. After all, they were good friends, and Sandburg was very much still alive.
But what is most interesting, perhaps, is the picture of a changing America, and the idea that Sandburg was a symbol of it. Perhaps THE symbol of it. And central to American culture of his time. Destined to be in the pantheon of great American writers from then on.
Carl Sandburg died in 1967 at the age of 89. How many of today’s younger generation ever run into his work?
(Gotta run. No time to proof..)
Art is 80 