ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Studs Terkel (1912–2008) was an award-winning author and radio broadcaster, and the author of Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession; Division Street: America, Coming of Age: Growing Up in the Twentieth Century; Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times; “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II; Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do; The Studs Terkel Reader: My American Century; American Dreams: Lost and Found; The Studs Terkel Interviews: Film and Theater; Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression; Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith; Giants of Jazz; Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Troubled Times; And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey; Touch and Go: A Memoir; P.S.: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening; and Studs Terkel’s Chicago, all published by The New Press. He was a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of a Presidential National Humanities Medal, the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a George Polk Career Award, a Peabody Award, the National Book Critics Circle 2003 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

9.2.2018   The Studs Terkel radio archive is now available to the public, including many interviews with some of the most notable writers of the 20th century

Studs Terkel conducted 5,600 hours of interviews during the forty-five years (1952 to 1997) he worked at Chicago’s WFMT-FM. The first installment of WFMT’s Studs Terkel Radio Archive—some 1,200 programs—has just been made available to the public. There are 725 interviews with writers, includingJames Baldwin, Dorothy Parker, Shel Silverstein, Tennessee Williams, Barbara Kingsolver, Jamaica Kincaid, and Texas’s Mary Karr.

Louis “Studs” Terkel was born in New York in 1912. His family moved to Chicago when Terkel was a small child, and he died there on Halloween in 2008 at the age of ninety-six. In between, he was an author, actor, radio host, and activist. Terkel earned a law degree from the University of Chicago but never practiced law. He began working on a statistical project with the Federal Emergency Rehabilitation Administration, one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies. Next Terkel found a spot in a writer’s project with the Works Progress Administration, where he began to write for radio. His first radio show, “The Wax Museum,” was basically whatever music Terkel liked at any given time.

When television became a force in the early 1950s, Terkel created and hosted “Studs’ Place.” According to WFMT’s website, it was at the tavern where “Studs’ Place” was set that people discovered “what Studs did best — talk and listen. Studs, arms waving, words exploding in bursts, leaning close to his companions, didn’t merely conduct interviews. He engaged in conversations.”

Terkel’s TV career was cut short by the pressures of commercialization and McCarthyism. “I was blacklisted because I took certain positions on things and never retracted,” Terkel said. “I signed many petitions that were unfashionable for causes, and I never retracted.” Thereafter he had a difficult time finding work and subsisted on small speaking fees and even smaller sums for writing book reviews. (In the years since, speaking fees have increased but not so much for book reviews.)

Eventually, an actress Terkel had interviewed was so impressed with his technique that she told her friend Andre Schiffrin, publisher at The New Press, about Terkel. Schiffrin was impressed with transcripts of some of Terkel’s interviews and managed to cajole the radio man into writing a book compiled from interviews with Chicagoans from all walks of life. Terkel thought Schiffrin was crazy but he agreed to write the book.

Division Street: America was published in 1967 to rave reviews and became a bestseller. Division Street “told the stories, in their own words, of businessmen, prostitutes, Hispanics, blacks, ordinary working people who formed the unity of America and also the divisions in society.” Terkel would spend the rest of his life exploring, and writing books about, the laboring lives of Americans, including a memoir of the Great Depression called Hard Times (1970); American Dreams: Lost and Found (1980), and a collection of World War II remembrances titled The Good War, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974) is probably Terkel’s best known book.

In 1994, Public Narrative created the Studs Terkel Community Media Award. This award is given each spring to journalists whose stories reflected the values of Terkel’s narrative storytelling. Since 1994, more than seventy journalists have been recognized for their work. Founded in 1989 as the Community Media Workshop, Public Narrative was born out of the belief that a free and informed press, as well as an educated public, are the cornerstones of democracy. The founders Hank DeZutter, a journalist and educator, and Thom Clark, a photographer and neighborhood nonprofit newsletter writer, saw that too many times, the voices of power were the ones quoted in news stories, rendering invisible the people working for change in the neighborhoods. With a grant from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the two men started training people who worked in nonprofits about the media. The 2018 Studs Terkel Awards will be announced September 20.

To learn more about the Studs Terkel Radio Archive and find his interview with your favorite author, please visit https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/.

Happy Labor Day, y’all.

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