Opening paragraphs....................

     He was seventy-two and famous, reclaiming his boyhood:  "When a man looks backward to things that happened to him 50 or 60 years ago," Carl Sandburg wrote in an unpublished manuscript, "he can often tell exactly what he saw and heard.  Some words and actions get burned into memory."  In the solitude of the Carolina mountains, he resurrected his Illinois prairie youth:  "to tell what those words and actions did to his mind and heart, what changes went on inside of him because of those words and actions, what new darkness or fresh lights became part of his personality, there the story of his life and growth goes winding into mysteries of the human mind and secrets of character, will, vision and hope that never come perfectly clear."

-Penelope Niven,  Carl Sandburg:  A Biography