Studs Terkel

Oral historian and radio personality

• Born: May 16, 1912
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: October 31, 2008
• Place of death: Chicago, Illinois

Terkel captured the heart of the American people in a dozen volumes that can collectively be called America’s memory book. He interviewed thousands of people about their work, their memories of America’s past, and their hopes for the future, and turned their stories into volumes of oral history.

Early Life

Studs Terkel (TUR-kehl) was born in New York to Anna and Samuel Terkel, Russian Jewish immigrants. An ethnic Jew, Terkel considered himself an agnostic. His parents moved Terkel and his older brothers, Mayer and Ben, to Chicago in 1922, where they managed and lived in hotels. Although his family lost everything in the stock market crash of 1929, Terkel managed to graduate from the University of Chicago, and in 1934 he obtained a law degree, although he would never practice law. In the later 1930’s, Terkel held a number of jobs, including one in the radio division of the Works Progress Administration’s Writers Project, a relief measure that was part of the New Deal. After a brief tour in the U.S. Army during World War II, Terkel established himself in radio in Chicago as both writer and performer. On the basis of his radio work, Terkel became a music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, and in 1950 he began hosting Studs’ Place, a television show that ran for three years in the golden age of early television, with a fresh and open mix of music and stimulating talk.

This period of Terkel’s career ended in the early 1950’s, with the anti-Communist blacklist of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which banned certain performers from film and television work because of their alleged political activities during the 1930’s. Terkel was never bitter about the blacklist, because it forced him back into radio, which was the best medium for his talents. In 1954, Terkel joined WFMT-FM, a small Chicago radio station that gave him the freedom to explore his various interests, and he worked there for the next forty-five years, playing mostly jazz and blues and interviewing the artists who made the music, and then an increasingly larger circle of people, famous, infamous, and unfamous. In addition to his daily radio work, Terkel found time to write plays, such as Amazing Grace (1959); to produce records, such as Born to Live: Hiroshima (1961); and to host the Newport Jazz Festival, in 1959 and 1960. Terkel’s first book, Giants of Jazz (1957), came directly out of his radio music work.

Life’s Work

The volumes of oral history for which Terkel became well known also evolved directly from his radio work. The first of these, Division Street: America (1967), was set in Chicago and collected the words of everyday people about themselves, their city, and the world. This cross section of urban confessions showed that most people in Chicago at the end of the 1960’s were thinking about civil rights and the Vietnam War. The book also demonstrated that Terkel did not so much interview people as listen to them talk.

Terkel’s fame was established over the next fifteen years with Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression in America (1970), Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974), American Dreams: Lost and Found (1980), and “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II (1984), which won thePulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

These four volumes established, and his later collections confirmed, the range and depth of Terkel’s focus. Terkel looked at subjects that many people had difficulty talking about: the Great Depression, World War II, race relations, and work. In the cumulative body of his oral histories, Terkel provided a collective portrait of Americans at the end of the twentieth century and of their feelings about themselves, about their past and future, about each other, and about their country. Although he had interviewed the rich and the famous, he was noteworthy for getting ordinary Americans to talk about their lives and their aspirations.

His later works continued his interests, if at a slightly less intense level. Chicago (1986) was a personal tribute to what he considered his hometown. (His name, Studs, came from the title character of James T. Farrell’s 1935 fictional trilogy Studs Lonigan, set in Chicago.) The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream (1988) confronted social class and poverty, while Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession (1992) took on perhaps the thorniest American problem. Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who’ve Lived It (1995) was a collection of interviews with older Americans. The Spectator: Talk About Movies and Plays with Those Who Make Them (1999) was followed by 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). During his long career, Terkel also published memoirs—from Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times (1977) through P.S.: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening (his last book, released in 2008)—but even his memoirs tended to be more a history of his times than of his personal life.

Terkel was married for sixty years to his wife Ida, who died in 1999, and they had one son, Paul. Several of his works have been adapted into theater and film, and he won numerous awards during his career, including a George Foster Peabody Broadcasting Award in 1980, the Eugene V. Debs Award for public service in 1983, and the George Polk Career Award in 1999. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1997. Terkel died of natural causes at the age of ninety-six in his home in Chicago.

Significance

Terkel won both popular and critical acclaim for his volumes of interviews, and his oral history has been recognized as a landmark in American literature. He had an uncanny knack to get people to talk and also to listen in such a way that they revealed themselves candidly, confessing their innermost dreams and fears. He used these revelations to build the books for which he is famous, volumes that give voice to the underlying American spirit. Without these interviews, Americans’ understanding of themselves and of important areas of American life—race, working, World War II, the Great Depression—would be incomplete. His books are often listed on bibliographies of college courses, for his revelations about how Americans think about themselves and their society are crucial to a full understanding of the nation’s inner life.

Bibliography

Baker, James T. Studs Terkel. New York: Twayne, 1992. Baker’s biography of Terkel includes a detailed study of his themes and methodologies.

Childers, Janice. “Studs Terkel: Conversations with America.” Oral History Review 36 (Winter/Spring, 2009): 82-84. Reviews the Web site produced by the Chicago History Museum, which received Terkel’s large collection of tape recordings upon his death.

Grele, Ronald J., ed. Envelopes of Sound: Six Practitioners Discuss the Method, Theory, and Practice of Oral History and Oral Testimony. Chicago: Precedent, 1975. Includes two papers from an oral history session at the 1973 Organization of American Historians meeting in Chicago, a long interview with Terkel, and a panel discussion with Terkel and others about oral history.

Parker, Tony. Studs Terkel: A Life in Words. New York: Holt, 1996. A biography of Terkel based on his own methods: interviews with Terkel himself, his family, colleagues at WFMT, and others. The volume also includes more than a dozen interviews Terkel did.

Wills, Garry. “He Interviewed the Nation.” New York Review of Books 55 (December 18, 2008): 53-54. Eulogizes Terkel and surveys his career.