This image is the cover for the book Always the Young Strangers

Always the Young Strangers

The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and historian recalls his midwestern boyhood in this classic memoir.

Born in a tiny cottage in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1878, Carl Sandburg grew with America. As a boy he left school at the age of thirteen to embark on a life of work—driving a milk wagon and serving as a hotel porter, a bricklayer, and a farm laborer before eventually finding his place in the world of literature.

In Always the Young Strangers, Sandburg delivers a nostalgic view of small-town life around the turn of the twentieth century and an invaluable perspective on American history.

Carl Sandburg

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, including Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), and Smoke and Steel (1920). He enjoyed “unrivaled appeal as a poet in his day, perhaps because the breadth of his experiences connected him with so many strands of American life,” and, upon his death in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson said about the writer: “Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America.”

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (www.hmhco.com)