Rootabaga Stories

A selection of tales from Rootabaga Country peopled with such characters as the Potato Face Blind Man, the Blue Wind Boy, and many others.

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.

Publishers Weekly

The Classics CornerCarl Sandburg's 1920 Rootabaga Stories and 1923 More Rootabaga Stories are back, in all their goofy read-aloud glory, in handsome cloth and paper reissues with interior illustrations by Maud and Miska Petersham. As the tales begin, Gimme the Ax's family sells everything they have pigs, pastures, pepper pickers, pitchforks and prepares to move as the neighbors speculate: They are going to Kansas, to Kokomo, to Canada, to Kankakee, to Kalamazoo, to Kamchatka, to the Chattahoochee. (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Carl Sandburg is widely known as the agreata poet from Illinois, and especially remembered for his monumental three-volume biographical study of Abraham Lincoln. He was also a journalist, author of childrenas stories, and pathbreaking songwriter.