Studs Terkel

Studs Terkel (born May 16, 1912, New York City, New York, U.S.—died October 31, 2008, Chicago, Illinois) was an American author and oral historian who chronicled the lives of Americans from the Great Depression to the early 21st century.

After spending his early childhood in New York City, Terkel moved with his family to Chicago at age nine. His parents ran the Wells-Grand Hotel, a rooming house that brought him into contact with the wide range of working-class people who would later inspire his early oral history collections.

Despite the Great Depression, Terkel managed to finish his schooling at the University of Chicago Law School. Terkel failed his first bar examination and decided not to pursue a career in law. In the 1930s, while holding down a job with the Works Progress Adminstration (WPA) Federal Writers’ Project, he embarked on a somewhat successful career as a radio actor, usually playing the tough-talking villain. His acting jobs led to other radio spots, including news commentator, sportscaster, and disc jockey. It was as a young actor that he adopted his lifelong nickname, “Studs,” from Chicago-born author James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy.

In 1945 Terkel inaugurated The Wax Museum, a radio program that brought out his knack for engaging people in impromptu interviews. Studs’s Place, Terkel’s nationally broadcast television show, ran from 1949 to 1952. The program comprised songs and stories and used a fictional bar as its backdrop. Its cancellation was due to Terkel’s leftist leanings, which got him blacklisted in the early 1950s. He returned to radio in 1952 with a daily talk show on the Chicago fine arts station WFMT; his show, which went by a few different names over the years, ran through January 1, 1998. Though the program was originally intended as a forum for music, Terkel’s famous interviews came to dominate his broadcasts.

In the late 1960s, Terkel began to use a tape recorder to chronicle his conversations with people outside his radio show. In 1967 he published Division Street: America, a book consisting of 70 conversations he had recorded with people in the Chicago area. He later wrote that the tape recorder

can be used to capture the voice of a celebrity…It can be used to capture the thoughts of the non-celebrated—on the steps of a public housing project, in a frame bungalow, in a furnished apartment, in a parked car—and these “statistics” become persons, each one unique. I am constantly astonished. (Working)

Division Street was a best seller and was followed by Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970). Two other books expanded the genre: Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974) and American Dreams, Lost and Found (1980). Both poignantly reveal that, at times, many Americans felt demoralized and disillusioned by their lots in life. Working was made into a stage musical.

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Terkel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Good War (1984) is an oral history of World War II that presents reminiscences of people, both famous and relatively unknown, who experienced it overseas and at home. Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times (1977) was the first of Terkel’s autobiographies; the second, Touch and Go, was released 30 years later.

In 1992 Terkel published the daring Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession. Perhaps even more than his earlier books and in light of the fact that the United States was feeling the pinch of a recession when the book was released, this oral history exposed a deep sense of disenchantment and even resentment among the interviewees. Despite the less-than-optimistic current that pervades Race, it provides a unique perspective on an emotionally charged issue.

Terkel stayed socially engaged and politically active throughout his life, continuing even at an advanced age to grant interviews, to speak at political and literary events, and to promote his books. His later works include Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith (2001), a collection of peoples’ thoughts on death, and And They All Sang: Reflections of an Eclectic Disk Jockey (2005), which gathered Terkel’s WFMT interviews with musicians ranging from a 22-year-old Bob Dylan to Big Bill Broonzy. P.S.: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening (2008) was published days after Terkel’s death.