“I am still studying verbs and the mystery of how they connect nouns,” wrote Carl Sandburg in The Atlantic in 1950, in an article entitled “Trying to Write.” He went on: “I am more suspicious of adjectives than at any other time in all my born days.” Sandburg was seventy-two years old at the time, and a master of more literary genres than most people ever contemplate: Poetry, history, journalism, biography, children’s fables, film criticism. He had produced an album of folk songs. He had inspired a famous exhibition of photographs. He had anticipated the Chicago race riots of 1919 in newspaper articles that were later described as “prophetic.” And yet, right up until the end of his life, Sandburg was still teaching himself how to write differently, speak differently, think differently. 

Born in a frontier town, Sandburg quit school to drive a milk wagon; he died a famous bard, at the apex of the hippie revolution and the civil rights movement. In between, he reinvented himself more than once—and so did the country. The work he left behind doesn’t just tell us about the America of the recent past but helps us think about how the United States can continue to transform itself, to question itself, to investigate itself, long into the future.