{"id":1424,"date":"2018-12-31T17:10:32","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T17:10:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1424"},"modified":"2018-12-31T17:10:32","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T17:10:32","slug":"lone-star-listensauthor-interview-by-michelle-newby-lancaster-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1424","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star ListensAuthor interview by Michelle Newby Lancaster"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Each week Lone Star Literary profiles a newsmaker in Texas books and letters, including authors, booksellers, publishers.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span>Michelle Newby Lancaster<\/span> is a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews<\/span> and Foreword Reviews, <\/span>writer, blogger at TexasBookLover.com, and a moderator for the Texas Book Festival. Her reviews appear in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, Concho River Review, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, The Rumpus, PANK Magazine,<\/span> and The Collagist.<\/span><\/p>\n

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/span><\/p>\n

Studs Terkel<\/span> (1912\u20132008) 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; \u201cThe Good War\u201d: 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; <\/span>and Studs Terkel\u2019s Chicago<\/span>, 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.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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9.2.2018\u00a0\u00a0 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<\/h1>\n

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Studs Terkel conducted 5,600 hours of interviews<\/span> during the forty-five years (1952 to 1997) he worked at Chicago\u2019s WFMT-FM. The first installment of WFMT\u2019s Studs Terkel Radio Archive\u2014some 1,200 programs\u2014has 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,<\/span> and Texas\u2019s Mary Karr.<\/span><\/p>\n

Louis \u201cStuds\u201d Terkel<\/span> 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\u2019s New Deal agencies. Next Terkel found a spot in a writer\u2019s project with the Works Progress Administration, where he began to write for radio. His first radio show, \u201cThe Wax Museum,\u201d was basically whatever music Terkel liked at any given time.<\/p>\n

When television became a force in the early 1950s, Terkel created and hosted \u201cStuds\u2019 Place.\u201d According to WFMT\u2019s website, it was at the tavern where \u201cStuds\u2019 Place\u201d was set that people discovered \u201cwhat Studs did best \u2014 talk and listen. Studs, arms waving, words exploding in bursts, leaning close to his companions, didn\u2019t merely conduct interviews. He engaged in conversations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Terkel\u2019s TV career was cut short by the pressures of commercialization and McCarthyism. \u201cI was blacklisted because I took certain positions on things and never retracted,\u201d Terkel said. \u201cI signed many petitions that were unfashionable for causes, and I never retracted.\u201d 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.)<\/p>\n

Eventually, an actress Terkel had interviewed was so impressed with his technique that she told her friend Andre Schiffrin,<\/span> publisher at The New Press, about Terkel. Schiffrin was impressed with transcripts of some of Terkel\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Division Street: America<\/span> was published in 1967 to rave reviews and became a bestseller. Division Street \u201ctold 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.\u201d 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<\/span> (1970); American Dreams: Lost and Found<\/span> (1980), and a collection of World War II remembrances titled The Good War,<\/span> which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do<\/span> (1974) is probably Terkel\u2019s best known book.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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,<\/span> a journalist and educator, and Thom Clark,<\/span> 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.<\/p>\n

To learn more about the Studs Terkel Radio Archive and find his interview with your favorite author, please visit https:\/\/studsterkel.wfmt.com\/<\/span><\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n

Happy Labor Day, y\u2019all.<\/p>\n

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Praise for Studs Terkel\u2019s WORKING<\/h1>\n

\u201cA deep penetration of American thought and feeling \u2026 A celebration of individuals \u2026 A masterpiece.\u201d \u2014Los Angeles Times<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAn enormous amount of exciting material \u2026 An incredible abundance of marvelous beings \u2026 A very special electricity and emotional power.\u201d
\u2014New York Times Book Review<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAn impressive achievement \u2026 A very valuable document. No journalist alive wields a tape recorder as effectively as Studs Terkel.\u201d \u2014Newsweek<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cRemarkable \u2026 the range is enormous \u2026 Work is the theme and we learn a lot about these trades.\u201d
\u2014The Wall Street Journal<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSplendid \u2026 Important \u2026 Rich and fascinating \u2026 people we meet are not digits in a poll but real people with real names who share their anecdotes, adventures, and aspirations with us.\u201d \u2014Business Week<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe real American experience \u2026 The poetry of real people \u2026 The hardness of real lives \u2026 A grand subject and a splendid book.\u201d \u2014Chicago Daily News<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c[A] magnificent book \u2026 A work of art. To read it is to hear America talking.\u201d
\u2014Boston Globe<\/span><\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Each week Lone Star Literary profiles a newsmaker in Texas books and letters, including authors, booksellers, publishers. Michelle Newby Lancaster is a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews and Foreword Reviews, writer, blogger at TexasBookLover.com, and a moderator for the Texas Book Festival. Her reviews appear in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, Concho River Review, Mosaic Literary Magazine, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}