Rootabaga Stories - Hardcover

Sandburg, Carl

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1463899025 ISBN 13: 9781463899028

Publisher: Alan Rodgers Books, 2011

Synopsis

The whimsical, sometimes melancholy stories, which often use nonsense language, were originally created for his own daughters. Gimme the Ax decided to let his children name themselves. "The first words they speak as soon as they learn to make words shall be their names," he said. "They shall name themselves." When the first boy came to the house of Gimme the Ax, he was named Please Gimme. When the first girl came she was named Ax Me No Questions. And both of the children had the shadows of valleys by night in their eyes and the lights of early morning, when the sun is coming up, on their foreheads. And the hair on top of their heads was a dark wild grass. And they loved to turn the doorknobs, open the doors, and run out to have the wind comb their hair and touch their eyes and put its six soft fingers on their foreheads.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Joyous, humorous, poetic, and always uniquely American, Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories are an important part of our children's literary legacy. In inimitable prose, Sandburg created Rootabaga Country-where the railroad tracks go from straight to zigzag, where the pigs have bibs on, and where the Village of Cream Puffs floats in the wind-and populated it with baby balloon pickers, flummywisters, Poker Face the Baboon and Hot Dog the Tiger, the White Horse Girl and the Blue Wind Boy, corn fairies, blue foxes, and many more fanciful characters. Rootabaga Stories, Part One is irrepressible, zany Americana-an anthology to delight admirers of Sandburg's genius.

About the Author:

Carl Sandburg (1878 - 1967) was an American poet, writer, and editor who 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."

About this edition

• Publisher: Alan Rodgers Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1463899025
• ISBN 13: 9781463899028
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 125