Commemorative Coin

Carl Sandburg spent nearly 30 years researching and writing about Abraham Lincoln. His six-volume biography of Lincoln won the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1940. This commemorative coin is one of many Lincoln items in Sandburg's collection. Sandburg's interest in Lincoln traced back to his teenage years in Galesburg, Illinois. Each day on his way to work at Barlow's dairy, young Sandburg walked by a plaque on the Knox College campus commemorating the Lincoln-Douglas debate of 1858. Sandburg's interest in Lincoln continued for the rest of his life. "Having found his theme and subject in the common man, Sandburg was drawn to a striking symbolic figure: Abraham Lincoln. 'He came nearer the average man and the common people than any man of the century,' Sandburg wrote, finding in Lincoln that 'warm compelling thing found in all real leaders of men, a kind of commonness through which each man whom he met saw that Lincoln was a man like himself, only bigger and deeper.'" (Niven, p 118)