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.

Author: Carl Sandburg
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Aegypan
Published: 08/01/2011
Pages: 126
Weight: 0.79lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.44d
ISBN: 9781463899028
Audience: 01 - 12

Accelerated Reader:
Reading Level: 5.5
Point Value: 4
Interest Level: Middle Grade
Quiz #/Name: 68143 / Rootabaga Stories

About the Author
Sandburg, Carl: - "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."