Harry Golden greatly admired and loved Carl Sandburg, and the feeling was indeed
      mutual. Toward the end of his life, Sandburg shared his papers, letters,
      photographs, and memories with Golden. Combining these materials with his
      own recollections, Golden reconstructs the life of his closest friend. His
      anecdotal account is both an engaging portrait of Sandburg and a tribute
      to their friendship. Generations of Sandburg's devoted readers will want
      to own this very personal biography.
     
 

Now published for the first time, Ever the Winds of Chance is Sandburg's evocative sequel to Always the Young Strangers (1953), "the best autobiography ever written by an American" (Robert E. Sherwood, New York Times). Though left unfinished at his death, the sequel provides a wry, nostalgic chronicle of Sandburg's college years and early adulthood, a restless decade for a young man still in quest of his calling.
Ever the Winds of Chance opens in 1898 when the twenty-year-old Sandburg, recently returned from the Spanish-American war, enrolls at Lombard College in his native Galesburg, Illinois. Sandburg writes about his job at the fire station; his teachers, inspired or otherwise; his classmates and their camaraderie; his observations on great literary works and writers; and his own writings for the school newspaper, literary review, and yearbook and for the Galesburg Mail. But he also includes much about life between school years and after college, recounting his various brief careers as a fireman, salesman of stereoscopic views, advertising copywriter, vagabond, "jailbird," and budding poet and socialist. Together these reminiscences provide an intimate look at the formative years of a preeminent figure in American letters.
 

"These letters reveal the thoughts of two fine, strong minds drawn to each other first by their interest in socialism, then by their love of poetry and a similarity of ethics and ideals. My mother recognized this in his early prose and poetry. They learned so much about each other from these letters, yet it seems extraordinary that there was so little personal contact."-- From the introduction by Margaret Sandburg
 

Two friends, a lifetime of letters, and an intimate look at a literary icon

Carl Sandburg first encountered Kenneth Dodson through a letter written at sea during World War II. Though Dodson wrote the letter to his wife, Letha, Sandburg read it in tears and told her, "I've got to meet this man." Composed primarily of their correspondence that continued until Sandburg's death in 1967, The Poet and the Sailor is a chronicle of the deep friendship that followed. Ranging over anything they found important, from writing to health and humor, the letters are arranged by Richard Dodson and are accompanied by a foreword from Sandburg's noted biographer, Penelope Niven.