Always the Young Strangers

by Carl Sandburg

Born in 1878, Carl Sandburg grew with America. As a boy he played, studied, and matured in Galesburg, Illinois. Sandburg's reminiscence delivers a nostalgic view of small-town life and an invaluable perspective on American history. Index.

Genres: Memoir, Biography, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, History

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1953

About the author

Free verse poems of known American writer Carl August Sandburg celebrated American people, geography, and industry; alongside his six-volume biography Abraham Lincoln (1926-1939), his collections of poetry include Smoke and Steel (1920).

This best editor won Pulitzer Prizes. Henry Louis Mencken called Carl Sandburg "indubitably an American in every pulse-beat."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_San...

Reviews

[Judith Squires]

Carl Sandburg was born in my hometown of Galesburg, Illinois. I always tended to take that fact for granted and enjoyed his poetry in high school but didn't discover "Always the Younger Strangers" until well into adulthood. It is a wonderful account of his experiences growing up in Galesburg. It is incredibly rich in terms of description and history. Carl was a poor boy, a son of Swedish immigrants and so much was happening in our nation in the years that he was growing up and, man, did he pay attention! I am also of Swedish descent (as are many in our prairie town) and I simply love this memoir. It is marvelous.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Galesburg, feelings about Carl Sandburg run deep. I’ve only lived in Galesburg for six years, so my relationship with Sandburg comes from growing up in the Chicago area, where there are frequent references to Chicago as the “City of the Big Shoulders” and “Hog Butcher for the World.” I’ve always admired Carl Sandburg as a poet.

Each year, the Galesburg Public Library hosts a community read, encouraging people in the area to read and discuss the same book. This year (2012), thanks to a grant from the Galesburg Community Foundation, we are celebrating Carl Sandburg’s book Always the Young Strangers. I was interested to read it, having heard strong statements about Sandburg and his relationship to his hometown from many people since I moved to Galesburg.

I’ve heard people say that Carl Sandburg was ashamed of Galesburg and did not have good things to say about it. That’s certainly not the impression I got from reading Always the Young Strangers, a warmly nostalgic look back at the Galesburg of his youth, full of fond memories and stories. He acknowledges the restlessness of youth and the conflicted relationships we have with the people and places who influence us in our childhoods:

What came over me in those years 1896 and 1897 wouldn’t be easy to tell. I hated my home town and yet I loved it. And I hated and loved myself about the same as I did the town and the people. I knew then as I know now that it was a pretty good home town to grow up in. I came to see that my trouble was inside myself more than it was in the town and the people. (p. 377)

Sandburg is a powerful writer, able to conjure up vivid images of life in Galesburg in the late 1800s. For example, he writes about doing laundry in Illinois in the winter:

In a blowing wind I pressed wooden clothespins to fasten bedsheets, shirts, drawers, handkerchiefs, stockings, and diapers on the rope clothesline. Often I found the clothes left in the basket had frozen stiff. Coaxing those frozen pieces of cloth to go around the rope for a wooden pin to be fastened over them was a winter sport with a challenge to your wit and numb fingers in Illinois zero weather, with sometimes a wild northwest wind knocking a shirt stiff as a board against your head. (p. 40)

In Chapter Eleven, “Learning a Trade,” he tells of going about Galesburg taking jobs and looking for a trade. He perfectly captures the monotony of one job in this passage, which reads almost like a prose poem:

When I took a job washing bottles in a pop bottling works one summer I didn’t expect to learn a trade. I knew the future in the job was the same as the past. You washed the same kind of bottles in the morning and afternoon today as you would be washing in the morning and afternoon tomorrow, and yesterday had been the same. You could see the used bottles coming in and the washed bottles going out and it was “Here they come” and “There they go” from seven in the morning till six at night. (p. 250)

Sandburg heard the railroad horns all Galesburg residents are familiar with, and economic times were bad when he was growing up. His recollections strike notes that resonate with us in today’s rough economic climate:

There was a note of doom and fate about the big railroad whistle in those Hard Times months. For years we had heard it at seven in the morning, at twelve noon, and at one and six o’clock in the afternoon. Now it blew at eight in the morning and twelve noon only. It was the Hard Times Clock saying, “Be careful, watch your pennies, wait and hope!” (p. 51)

Sandburg speaks with great affection for and admiration of his parents and their lives as Swedish immigrants in America. He also speaks of how Galesburg shaped him: “In those years as a boy in that prairie town I got education in scraps and pieces of many kinds, not knowing that they were part of my education.” (p. 230)

If you are interested in a detailed and intimate picture of life in a small American town in the late 1800s, and especially if you are interested in Galesburg history, I recommend Carl Sandburg’s Always the Young Strangers. You may learn a few things about Galesburg, Carl Sandburg, and yourself.

[Rwildfon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone who appreciates Carl Sandburg's writing, poems, Lincoln, or Rootabaga will love to hear the story of his life - straight from the horse's mouth. I admire him even more for how he came here, what he went through, and what inspired him along the way.

[Marcia Haskell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lyrical, Motivating, Inspiring, and easy to read. A joy forever,

[T.J. Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5, rounded down

Y'all, I am sad. "Always the Young Strangers" is probably my biggest reading disappointment of the year. It's not the book I have scored the lowest (it still had its merits!), but I just had such high hopes for it, and it didn't end up being what I was expecting at all.

My family visited the Carl Sandburg Historic Site in Flat Rock, NC in May, and we all had a lovely time. It is beautiful, and there are goats, and I was especially enamored with what I learned about Sandburg himself - his downhome, working class, "grit-and-gumption" ethos. He came across as grounded and humble, as well as fiercely intelligent and curious. (His house is overflowing with books! Even after a large part of his collection was donated to various institutions.) I wanted to know more about him, but I am not a big poetry reader. Thus I was very excited when I learned that he had written a memoir of his early life in the prairie town of Galesburg, IL in the late 1800s. I love prairie stories! I love small town memoirs! I love learning more about historic Americana!

Unfortunately, "Always the Young Strangers" did not work well for me. It is not really a memoir in the usual sense. It does not take a chronological approach; instead, Sandburg offers some vaguely thematic chapters in which he heaps discrete memory after memory, some only a paragraph or so long. Thus it was very choppy and often very tedious to get through. For example, the chapter "Kid Talk - Folk Talk" is 13 pages of Sandburg listing common sayings and phrases of his peers and elders of that era. And that was a mercifully short chapter. Even odder was the chapter "Theme in Shadow and Gold," which was basically a list of all the notorious women and cheating/marital discord stories he knew about in his community as a youth (39 pages!!). (And kind of creepy, honestly).

I did find much to admire in Sandburg's actual writing. He has a wry, unadorned, folksy style that made me smile in places. There were a few chapters that told more of a story, which I enjoyed. I liked the early chapters where he talked about his parents, who seemed like such honest, upright, hard working people. And I quite enjoyed the two later chapters, "Hobo" and "Soldier," where he reflected on the time he went hoboing for several months as a teen and his service in Puerto Rico during the Spanish American War, respectively. Those read more chronologically. 

But overall it was so hard to concentrate with the book's awkward, disjointed flow. And this is not Sandburg's fault, but my digital copy was just littered with terrible typos. Most were obvious ("I was rune years old, almost ten" or "stamp his enemies tinder his feet"), but in other places, I had to pause and wonder what was really meant, whether what I was seeing was a typo or not. (For example, this part about his parents: "They were mates. I am sore they had sweet and wild nights together as bedfellows." I assume "sore" was supposed to be "sure," but "sore" *could* work, and it would certainly change the flavor of that reflection.)

Anyways, instead of loving this book as I was expecting, it became a painful exercise in trying to focus, and I was just really relieved to be done with it. It had a few good scenes that I think I will remember, and I am still intrigued by Sandburg and the way his mind works...but probably not enough to read another book by him. Also, whomever transcribed and edited the digital edition should be ashamed. There were mistakes on almost every page.

[Lynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though I live in Galesburg, the town where Carl Sandburg grew up, I had not read this book. It was delightful. Writing about a youngster growing up in a town a hundred years ago provides such interesting material. Sandburg knew so many of the townspeople well enough to write about them. He also knew the town well, as young boys earned their keep by delivering milk or newspapers, running errands, and helping with small maintenance jobs. Sandburg did all of these things and he became well acquainted with those around him. It is interesting from today's perspective to look back upon how things were in an earlier day. Life wasn't easy, but there were a lot of positive things one could say about life in Galesburg at the turn of the century. Sandburg does this with humor and joy.

[Bruce Fogerty · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Sandburg. His poems, and in this case his narratives, absolutely screams Americana. Read this book and you will feel as though you fell into an Andrew Wyeth, a Grant Wood, or an Edward Hopper painting.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Besides being Carl Sandburg's autobiography, this is a sweet capture of life in the late 19th century midwest. I expected it to cover more of his young adulthood and hobo years, but only the second-to-last chapter was about that and the very last was about his experience in the Spanish-American War. Just as well, because the descriptions of his parents and fellow townspeople were my favorite sections.

[Christina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book rings true as a portrayal of life in Galesburg, IL in the early part of the 20th century. Because my grandparents lived there, I recognize many of the details of the Swedish immigrant culture.

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sandburg has fallen out of favor as a poet and a biographer during the last 50 years. No matter. His autobiography remains one of the finest by any American. A fascinating glimpse of the late 19th Century through the eyes of an Illinois prairie native.