A short life of the author
Studs Terkel (born Louis Terkel, 16 May 1912 – 31 October 2008) was an American oral historian, radio broadcaster, actor, and activist whose books — compiled from thousands of interviews with ordinary Americans about their work, their wars, their racial experiences, and their lives — constitute the most extensive and important work of oral history ever produced in the United States. He was, as he liked to say, “a guerrilla journalist with a tape recorder,” and the territory he documented was nothing less than the American twentieth century as experienced by the people who lived it.
Early Life
Terkel was born in New York City, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. His family moved to Chicago when he was eleven, and his parents ran a rooming house and then a hotel near Bughouse Square, the public park that served as Chicago’s open-air debating forum. The hotel’s residents — workers, drifters, radicals, eccentrics — gave the young Terkel an education in human variety and an ear for the spoken word that no university could have matched.
He attended the University of Chicago and the University of Chicago Law School, passed the bar exam, and never practised law. Instead, he drifted into radio, acting, and journalism — performing in Works Progress Administration theatre productions, hosting a music and interview programme on WFMT in Chicago that ran for over forty-five years, and gradually developing the interviewing technique that would define his career.
Working (1974)
Terkel’s most famous book is built from interviews with over 130 Americans about their jobs — from gravediggers to airline stewardesses, from steelworkers to prostitutes, from dentists to baseball players, from waitresses to corporate executives. The book’s opening line — “This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence — to the spirit as well as to the body” — announces its thesis: that most work in America is experienced as a form of suffering, and that the people who do it deserve to have their experience taken seriously.
What makes Working extraordinary is the quality of the voices. Terkel was one of the great interviewers — warm, curious, non-judgmental, genuinely interested in what his subjects had to say — and his editorial method (he transcribed the interviews, shaped them into readable monologues, and arranged them thematically) produced narratives that read like short stories. Each speaker is fully present on the page: you hear their rhythm, their vocabulary, their self-consciousness, their pride or shame about what they do.
Working was adapted into a Broadway musical (1978) and a television special, and it remains the definitive literary document of American labour.
Hard Times (1970)
Terkel’s oral history of the Great Depression collects the memories of Americans who lived through the 1930s — factory workers, bankers, farmers, housewives, hobos, politicians, and business executives. The book is both a historical document (capturing memories that were already fading in 1970) and a meditation on how people remember catastrophe: some with bitterness, some with nostalgia, some with the bewildered recognition that the worst period of their lives was also, in some ways, the most vivid.
”The Good War” (1984)
Terkel’s oral history of the Second World War — the quotation marks around “Good” are his, signalling his skepticism about the phrase — won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. The book collects the memories of Americans who fought in, worked during, or were otherwise affected by the war, and its range is extraordinary: soldiers and conscientious objectors, defence plant workers and Japanese-American internees, war brides and Gold Star mothers. Terkel’s achievement is to complicate the simple narrative of the “Good War” without denying that the war was, in fact, fought against genuine evil.
Other Major Works
Division Street: America (1967) is an oral portrait of Chicago. Race (1992) examines American racial attitudes through interviews with Black and white Americans. The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream (1988) explores the gap between American ideals and American reality. Will the Circle Be Unbroken? (2001) collects reflections on death and mortality. Coming of Age (1995) documents the experience of growing old in America.
In each of these books, Terkel’s method is the same: find the people, turn on the tape recorder, listen, and then shape what he hears into literature. The consistency of the method across different subjects demonstrates that Terkel’s real subject was never work, or war, or race, or death — it was the American voice itself.
Radio and Public Life
Terkel’s radio programme on WFMT, The Studs Terkel Program, ran from 1952 to 1997 and featured interviews with everyone from Martin Luther King Jr. to Dorothy Parker, from James Baldwin to Bob Dylan. He was also a political activist — he was blacklisted during the McCarthy era for his progressive politics — and a beloved figure in Chicago’s cultural life.
Collecting Terkel
Working (1974, Pantheon) in first edition with dust jacket is the primary collectible, typically bringing $50–$200. “The Good War” (1984, Pantheon) first editions are also sought. Signed copies are available, as Terkel was a prolific signer at book events.