On his return from the campaign in Porto Rico, Sandburg entered Lombard College in Galesburg and, for the first time, began to think in terms of literature. He had already seen a great deal of the world from the roaring alleys of great cities as well as from the underside of box-cars; he had loafed, fought and expressed himself richly. So, what with the fact that the “terrible Swede,” as captain of the basket-ball team, won a series of new victories, it is little wonder that he was idolized by his class-mates and elected editor-in-chief of the college paper. After leaving college he did all manner of things to earn a living. He was advertising manager for a department store and worked as district organizer for the Social-Democratic party of Wisconsin. He became a salesman, a pamphleteer, a newspaperman. On the staff of a business magazine, he became a “safety first” expert; his articles on accident prevention bringing him before manufacturers’ conventions where he talked about machinery safeguards and methods found successful in reducing injuries in factory organizations. In 1904, Sandburg published the proverbial “slender sheaf”; a tiny pamphlet of twenty-two poems, uneven in quality but strangely like the work of the mature Sandburg in feeling. What is more, these experiments anticipated the very inflection of the later poems, with their spiritual kinship to Henley, Lincoln and Whitman; several of these early experiments (with the exception of the rhymed verses) might be placed, without seeming incongruous, in the most recent collection of Sandburg’s pieces. The idiom of _Smoke and Steel_ (1920) is more intensified, but it is the same idiom as that of “Milville” (1903), which begins: Down in southern New Jersey they make glass. By day and by night, the fires burn on in Milville and bid the sand let in the light. Meanwhile the newspaperman was having a hard struggle to keep the poet alive. Until he was thirty-six years old, Sandburg was totally unknown to the literary world. In 1914 a group of his poems appeared in _Poetry; A Magazine of Verse_; later the same year one of the group (the now famous “Chicago”) was awarded the Levinson prize of two hundred dollars. A little more than a year later his first, full-fledged book was published, and Sandburg—tardily but triumphantly—had arrived.