Terkel, Studs (1912–)

Studs Terkel is a writer, labor activist, oral historian, and radio personality. Born Louis Terkel on May 6, 1912, in New York City, he moved to Chicago early in life, to which he credits his populist view of the world by observing the workers, unionists, and immigrants that went by his family's boardinghouse. After joining the radio division of the Works Progress Administration Writers Project in the 1930s, Studs Terkel first became known for his radio interview program, which ran on Chicago's WFMT public radio station from 1952 to 1997. Continuing in the tradition of the Writers Project, the New Deal program, which permanently connected the arts and literature to the goals of the working class, Terkel's wide-ranging curiosity and social consciousness led him to create or compile more than 20 books of interviews, oral history, and reportage over his long career. His ground-breaking 1974 oral history Working; People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, a collection of interviews with people of all classes about their working lives, was turned into a popular musical and made Terkel a hero to the labor movement, for the simple but powerful act of listening and recording their stories.

He won the Pulitzer Prize for The Good War in 1985, which challenged prevailing perceptions of World War II using first-person accounts. He devoted several books to reexamining other periods of American history from a people's perspective, including Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970), Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who've Lived It (1995), and My American Century (1997). He has explored the larger topics that preoccupy the American consciousness in Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession (1992), The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream (1988), Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Reflections on Death, Rebirth and Hunger for a Faith (2001), and Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times (2003). Terkel has a long-standing interest in the great performing artists of the 20th century, many of whom he has interviewed over the years; books that resulted from these interviews include Giants of Jazz (1957), Spectator: Talk About Movies and Plays With the People Who Make Them (1999), and They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey (2005).

Terkel can be considered as an influence on numerous writers, muckrakers, historians, and performers, most notably, historian Howard Zinn, who wrote A People's History of the United States; interviewer and performer Anna Deavere Smith, who calls Studs her hero; and Midwestern public radio personality Garrison Keillor, on whose programs Terkel has been a long-running guest raconteur. A member of the Academy of American Arts and Letters and a recipient of the Thomas Merton Award for “national and international individuals struggling for justice,” Studs [Page 1366]Terkel is currently a distinguished scholar-in-residence of the Chicago Historical Society.