Wilson shoots down Sandburg

Birthday of poet Carl Sandburg, born 1878.

"The cruellest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg." -- Edmund Wilson, referring to Sandburg's famous biography of Abraham Lincoln.



"The philanthropists and social reformers who know worship his (Lincoln's) name," wrote G. K. Chesterton, "would have regarded him as belonging to the type which they think 'unemployable'; a scalawag, a drifter and dreamer, a man who would come to no good. His casualness, his coarseness, his habit of taking up this and that and not making it pay, his changes of trade and dwelling-place...Though Lincoln was never an habitual drunkard like Grant, he had all about him the same savor of unsuccess."