Always the Young Strangers was published by Harcourt, Brace in 1953. The memoir covers Sandburg’s first twenty years: born Carl August Sandburg in 1878 in Galesburg, Illinois, the son of August Sandburg (a Swedish immigrant blacksmith’s helper) and Clara Anderson. He left school at thirteen to work — milk wagon driver, porter at the Union Hotel, scene-shifter at a theater, laborer at a brickyard, wheat harvester in Kansas.
The memoir renders small-town Illinois in the 1880s and 1890s with the same accumulative precision Sandburg brought to his biography of Lincoln: the circus coming to town, the Fourth of July celebrations, the Swedish immigrant community’s customs, the labor of growing up poor, the discovery of books at the public library. Sandburg is unsentimental about poverty but also unapologetic about the richness of his early life.
The decisive break: in 1898, Sandburg enlisted for the Spanish-American War, served briefly in Puerto Rico (saw no combat), and used his veteran’s benefits to attend Lombard College in Galesburg, where he encountered his first real intellectual community. The memoir ends at twenty — before he became a journalist, a poet, a biographer. It is the portrait of a self-education achieved through labor and accident rather than privilege.
Collecting Always the Young Strangers
First edition (Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1953): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $30–$60
- Signed: $80–$200