BOOK REVIEWS175 CoW Sandburg: A Biography. By Penelope Niven. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1991. Pp. xix, 843. $35.00.) In this first comprehensive biography of Carl Sandburg, Penelope Niven requires over seven hundred pages of text to describe the writer's long and extraordinarily varied life and career. It is easy in the 1990s to forget that in addition to being a poet and a Lincoln biographer, Sandburg was also a Socialist organizer and a newspaperman, and acclaimed as an author of children's stories, as a folk music collector, as a novelist, a screenwriter, and a radio and television personality—all this in addition to other occupations in his early youth. Such versatility is certainly uncommon among either poets or biographers, and it was arguably an undoing: it made Sandburg vulnerable to charges, even in his lifetime, of achievement that fell short of full development, especially in the fields for which he remains best known. Niven seems most comfortable with discussing Sandburg the poet, and she acknowledges that Sandburg's best poetry was probably his earliest, written as it was with a hard edge that was expressive of his radical political orientation. Sandburg ceased to be a Socialist in 1916, and thereafter moved ideologically toward the middle of the road. Though he subsequently eschewed party affiliation, he became something of a populist and by the 1930s definitely a New Dealer, and his poetry accordingly became more mainstream or even celebratory in orientation. Unlike contemporaries such as Frost and William Carlos Williams, Sandburg never shrank from causes—patriotic, popular, or unpopular—and the purity of his art was considered suspect as a result. That poets and critics seldom attend to Sandburg nowadays is also a reflection of how much poetry was an accessible public art early in this century, though an elite, highbrow one these days. Though Sandburg was accused by Williams in 1951 of simply failing to develop as a poet, he never claimed to write for any but a popular audience, in a free-verse idiom that was innovative around World War I, but out of favor later. Sandburg's almost life-long identification with Abraham Lincoln is also duly noted by Niven. That identification was manifest in Sandburg's early lyceum lectures and Socialist journalism as well as in the Lincoln biography itself. Late in life the Lincoln identification helped make Sandburg a kind of popular spokesman for World War II and Cold War America, a nation perceived to be in a prolonged crisis not unlike that of the Union a century before. Significantly it was he who was asked to address Congress on the occasion of Lincoln's 150th birthday in 1959. Of the Lincoln biography Niven is less critical than she is of Sandburg's poetry, and she somewhat soft-pedals the ambivalence of scholars toward it at the time of its publication and ever since. And she fails to indicate 176CIVIL WAR HISTORY the real differences between The Prairie Years and The War Years, the former, excessively poetic as it is, certainly deserving more scholarly reproof than the latter. Yet despite the absence of scholarly apparatus in the biography, Sandburg was a conscientious researcher as Niven shows, and she also points out that both components of the biography were written without access to such more recently available sources as the Basier edition of Lincoln's Collected Works, the Robert Todd Lincoln Papers, or the Herndon-Weik Collection. Indeed Niven acknowledges Sandburg's role in persuading Archibald MacLeish to acquire the latter for the Library of Congress. One feels compelled to add that Sandburg's Lincoln still represents an achievement duplicated by no team of scholars in the twentieth century and no single Lincoln authority ever; it is the only comprehensive multivolume biography of Lincoln to be published since that of Nicolay and Hay. Some might argue that there is more in this volume about Sandburg than the contemporary generation would like to know. There is a great deal of family information, for instance, but it is material that merits inclusion because of the importance of Sandburg's wife and daughters to him, however much he was an absent husband and parent in...