Cornhuskers was published by Henry Holt in 1918 and shared the first Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (with Margaret Widdemer’s Old Road to Paradise; technically the prize went to “a volume of verse published during the year”). Where Chicago Poems was urban and industrial, Cornhuskers is rural and agricultural — the Illinois prairie where Sandburg grew up as the son of Swedish immigrants.
The collection includes “Prairie” (a long meditation on the Illinois flatland and the people who work it), “Cool Tombs” (a brief elegy meditating on Lincoln, Grant, and Pocahontas sleeping in the earth), and sequences about small-town life that anticipate Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology but without Masters’s bitterness.
Sandburg’s prairie is not pastoral in the traditional sense — there is no Arcadia here, no shepherds, no Golden Age. The farmers are tired, the work is brutal, the weather is indifferent. But Sandburg finds dignity in the labor itself and beauty in the landscape’s vastness. The prairie poems established him as the primary poet of the American heartland.
Collecting Cornhuskers
First edition (Henry Holt, New York, 1918): Boards with paper label.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $150–$400
- Signed: $300–$800