In honor and anticipation of Mr. Sandburg’s birthday, I started reading Abe Lincoln Grows Up a few days ago and finished it last night. It’s a different sort of biography, a poetic biography if you will.
“Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years was first published for Lincoln’s Birthday in 1926. Since then, it has become evident that the book lives for people of all ages, but the earlier chapters on Lincoln’s own childhood hold special interest for young readers. Abe Lincoln Grows Up is drawn from the first twenty-seven chapters of the original biography.” ~from the book jacket blurb
This “taken from and adult biography” aspect of the book accounts for its rich vocabulary, not dumbed down at all, and its sometimes smartly subject matter. Sandburg writes about all of the varied cultural facets of the frontier in Indiana, Kentucky, and Illinois where Abe Lincoln grew up, including drunkenness, brawling, death, disease, Indian wars, prejudice, and slavery. And he doesn’t really mince words, although the language is more poetic than graphic.
Maybe some examples, taken at random, would be helpful:
“Abe was the chore-boy of the Knob Creek farm as soon as he grew big enough to run errands, to hold a pine-knot at night lighting his father at a job, or to carry water, fill the woodbox, clean ashes from the fireplace, hoe weeds, pick berries, grapes, persimmons for beer-making. He hunted the timbers and came back with walnuts, hickory and hazel nuts. His hands knew the stinging blisters from using a hoe handle back and for a summer afternoon, and in autumn the mash of walnut-stain that wouldn’t wash off, with all the rinsing and scrubbing of Nancy Hank’s homemade soap.” p. 44.
“He wanted to learn, to know, to live, to reach out; he wanted to satisfy hungers and thirsts he couldn’t tell about, this big boy of the backwoods. And some of what he wanted so much, so deep down, seemed to be in the books. Maybe in books he would find the answers to dark questions pushing around in the pools of his thoughts and the drifts of his mind.” p. 135.
“At Anderson Creek ferry, he saw and talked with settlers, land buyers and sellers, traders, hunters, peddlers, preachers, gamblers, politicians, teachers, and men shut-mouthed about their business. Occasionally there came a customer who looked as if he might be one of the ‘half horse, half alligator men’ haunting the Ohio watercourse those years.” p. 148.
The book is illustrated by James Daugherty, and just as the prose won’t be to everyone’s taste, so the picture are in Daugherty’s style, dark, writhing, pen and ink, almost caricature. It’s not my favorite style, but Daugherty’s talent is evident.
I enjoyed the book, but I’m not sure how accessible it will be to the middle grade or even young adult readers it is meant to engage. The language and the stories that Sandburg tells, many of them handed down from witnesses who heard Lincoln himself tell them, are colloquial and somewhat out of context for the modern reader. Some are more immediate and comprehensible, like the stories of Lincoln’s generosity and his thirst for learning.
For a child who is particularly interested in Lincoln and the stories of his life and times, Abe Lincoln Grows Up would be a treasure, to read and re-read over and over. But I’m afraid that most of those who pick it up just to read about the great president, perhaps for a school assignment, are going to be discouraged by the disjointed and philosophical prose that verges on poetry but isn’t really.
Carl Sandburg won three Pulitzer Prizes: two for books of his poetry and one for the second volume of biography of Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. His book of children’s stories, Rootabaga Pigeons, published in 1923, emerges from copyright protection this year. Has anyone read these stories, and do you have an opinion?
