Good Morning America.

SANDBURG, Carl. [William Safire].

$350.00

Item Number: 127368

New York: Crosby Gaige, 1928.

Signed limited first edition of Sandburg’s classic poem, originally delivered at Harvard as a Phi Beta Kappa poem. Octavo, bound in full morocco with gilt titles and tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised gilt bands, double gilt ruling to the front and rear panels, gilt turn-ins and inner dentelles, marbled endpapers, top edge gilt, ribbon bound in. One of 811 copies signed by the author, this is number 238. From the library of American journalist William Safire with his bookplate to the pastedown and gilt initials to the front panel. William Safire was an important American author, columnist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter. He joined Nixon’s campaign for the 1960 Presidential race, and again in 1968. After Nixon’s 1968 victory, Safire served as a speechwriter for him and Spiro Agnew. He authored several political columns in addition to his weekly column “On Language” in The New York Times Magazine from 1979 until the month of his death and authored two books on grammar and linguistics: The New Language of Politics (1968) and what Zimmer called Safire’s “magnum opus,” Safire’s Political Dictionary. Safire later served as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board from 1995 to 2004 and in 2006 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush. In very good condition.

American poet, biographer, journalist, and editor Carl Sandburg won three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. During his lifetime, Sandburg was widely regarded as "a major figure in contemporary literature", especially for volumes of his collected verse, including Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), and Smoke and Steel (1920). He enjoyed "unrivaled appeal as a poet in his day, perhaps because the breadth of his experiences connected him with so many strands of American life", and at his death in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson observed that "Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America."