Abraham Lincoln, The Prairie Years and The War Years, a full, six-volume presentation set of first trade editions, the first volume of each set inscribed with a line from one of his poems, signed, and dated by Sandburg for his close and longtime friends, photographer Len Steckler and his wife, Olga.
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1926 & 1939. First trade editions. Hardcover. This is a double-inscribed set of the author’s complete, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of President Abraham Lincoln. The first volume of each set is warmly inscribed, signed, and dated by Carl Sandburg to his longtime, close friends, the photographer Len Steckler and his wife, Olga. All six volumes are first trade editions, uniformly bound in heavy dark blue buckram with gilt spine print and Lincoln's facsimile signature in blind on the front covers.
The inscriptions
Sandburg inscribed Volume I of The Prairie Years in five lines on the front free endpaper recto: "For Len & Olga Steckler | and I love you a | million bushels | Carl Sandburg | 1957". Sandburg inscribed Volume I of The War Years in five lines on the front free endpaper recto: "Len and Olga | The peace of great | phantoms be for you - | Carl | 1957". Sandburg’s inscription in Volume I of The Prairie Years is derived from the first line of his poem “How Much?” Sandburg’s inscription in Volume I of The War Years is a verbatim excerpt from the first line of the final stanza of his poem “For You”.
Condition
Condition of all six volumes approaches near fine. The volumes are square, clean, and tight, with sharp corners and bright spine gilt. We note only trivial shelf wear to extremities. The contents are immaculately clean, with no spotting, no appreciable age toning, and no previous ownership marks other than the author's inscriptions. The yellow topstain remains uniform, showing only a little shelf dust.
Len and Olga
Photographer, illustrator, and filmmaker Len Steckler (1928-2016) and his first wife Olga Bogach Steckler (1922-2020), had a decades-long friendship with Sandburg. Near the end of Sandburg’s life, Steckler would also capture some remarkable images of his friend.
Len Steckler had long been well-known for marquee advertising campaigns when, in 2010, he received widespread attention for the release of a previously unknown series of photographs, entitled "Marilyn Monroe: The Visit". These captured a seemingly improbable, implausibly touching encounter in American cultural history, which occurred in Steckler's apartment four years after Sandburg inscribed these volumes. In December 1961 Carl Sandburg was 83 years old and staying with the Stecklers in their New York City apartment when 35-year-old Marilyn Monroe - an admirer and friend of Sandburg - visited. While the two talked, Steckler photographed them, capturing compellingly candid images that were not released to the public until half a century later. They are rendered all the more compelling by the fact that Monroe died just nine months later.
As to the friendship between the Stecklers and Sandburg, this is evidenced not only in the warmth of these inscriptions, but by the fact that Sandburg inscribed a number of books to the couple between 1943 and 1961. This particular inscribed set contains the work that won Sandburg the Pulitzer Prize for History.
Pulitzers for Poetry AND History
Sandburg remains the only person ever to win a Pulitzer Prize for both Poetry and History. Equal parts biography, work of literature, and epic prose poem, Carl Sandburg’s (1878-1967) monumental, multivolume biography of Abraham Lincoln has been called “the best-selling, most widely read, and most influential book[s] about Lincoln.” When the work was first conceived in 1922 Sandburg seemed an unlikely figure to write a biography of an American President. Sandburg was not a writer of prose, much less history. He was widely acclaimed for his poetry, which included Chicago Poems (1916) and Cornhuskers (1918), for which he received his first Pulitzer Prize in 1919.
Abraham Lincoln was a source of lifelong fascination and admiration for Sandburg, who collected information about the iconic President for 30 years before he began writing about him. Like his fellow poet, Walt Whitman, Sandburg viewed Lincoln as a representative of the hope of American democracy. (Sandburg wrote in a 1938 letter “Old Walt strolls in and out of the pages [of Sandburg’s Lincoln biography] regularly”.) The first two volumes, The Prairie Years, were published in 1926. Though the historical value was certainly questioned – Sandburg was less than forthcoming about sources – his work was immediately heralded for its singular point of view. Historian Allan Nevins called it “homely but beautiful, learned but simple, exhaustively detailed but panoramic… [occupying] a niche all its own, unlike any other biography or history in the language.” Sandburg’s Lincoln was both a real person and a source of American myth. It was as one historian put it, “A poem of the human spirit, not Lincoln’s spirit only.”
Sandburg followed his two-volume pastoral with a four-volume history of Lincoln’s time in Washington and his response to the great American crisis of the 19th century. When The War Years was published in 1939 Sandburg was well aware of the timeliness of its title. He wrote to President Roosevelt, "Having written for ten years now on 'Abraham Lincoln: the War Years,' starting this year on the fourth and final volume, I have my eyes and ears in two eras and cannot help drawing parallels. One runs to the effect that you are the best light of democracy that has occupied the White House since Lincoln."
Sandburg won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize in History for this work. He would win his third Pulitzer – his second for poetry – in 1951 for Complete Poems. Upon his death in 1967, Carl Sandburg was eulogized by President Lyndon B. Johnson as “more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America.”. Item #008885
Price: $1,600.00