Studs Terkel
Personal Information
Description
Studs Terkel was born Louis Terkel in New York on May 16, 1912. The family moved to Chicago in 1922 and opened a rooming house. From 1926 to 1936 they ran another rooming house, the Wells-Grand Hotel at Wells Street and Grand Avenue. Terkel credited his knowledge of the world to the tenants who gathered in the lobby of the hotel and the people who congregated in nearby Bughouse Square a meeting place for workers, labor organizers, dissidents, the unemployed, and religious fanatics of many persuasions. Terkel attended University of Chicago and received a law degree in 1934. After a brief stint with the civil service in Washington D.C., he returned to Chicago and worked with the WPA Writers Project in the radio division. After a year in the Air Force, he returned to writing radio shows and ads. In 1944, he landed his own show on WENR. This was called the Wax Museum show that allowed him to express his own personality and play recordings he liked from folk music, opera, jazz, or blues. A year later he had his own television show called Stud's Place and started asking people the kind of questions that marked his later work as an interviewer. In 1952 Terkel began working for WFMT, first with the "Studs Terkel Almanac" and the "Studs Terkel Show," primarily to play music. The interviewing came along by accident. This later became the award-winning, "The Studs Terkel Program." His first book, Giants of Jazz, was published in 1956. Ten years later his first book of oral history interviews, Division Street: America, came out. It was followed by a succession of oral history books on the 1930s Depression, World War Two, race relations, working, the American dream, and aging. His last oral history book, Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith, was published in 2001. Late into his life Terkel continued to interview people, work on his books, and make public appearances. He was the first Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at the Chicago Historical Society. His last book, P.S.: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening was released in November 2008. --From Studsterkel.org
Books
Hope Dies Last
These interviews--with congressmen and cooks, union organizers and CEOs, students, immigrants, activists, veterans, priests and lawyers--constitute an alternative history of the American century. They form a legacy of the indefatigable spirit that Studs has always embodied, an inheritance for those who, by taking a stand, are making concrete the dreams of today.--From publisher description.
Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith
From interviews with a Hiroshima survivor, AIDS caseworker, death-row parolee, police, firefighters, emergency health workers, doctors, nurses, writers, undertakers, clergy, etc., etc.
Good War an Oral History of World War 2
The dean of oral history evokes the innocent idealism, as well as the terror and horror, of ordinary Americans at home and abroad during World War II.
Good War-V1
This book is about WW2 and the people who lived through it, in their own words. It really makes you think. It takes you through some good exsperiences and many bad. I think everyone should read it.
Sez who? sez me
More than a decade's worth of essays by the Pulitzer Prize winning syndicated columnist capture the essence of big city American life, from neighborhood taverns to backroom politics. The human comedy has Mike Royko on the hip and we're all the better for it.
American dreams, lost and found
Presents 100 interviews with a cross section of American people, both famous and non-famous, who discuss their personal lives and ambitions.
Hard times
"Presents a comprehensive account of economic depressions in America from colonial times to the "Great Recession" that began in 2008." --Jacket.
Division Street: America
Life stories, based on personal interviews, of some seventy selected residents of Chicago, Ill. intended to portray changes occurring in the U.S.A. during the past few decades.
Giants of jazz ; sketches by Robert Galster
Brief biographies of thirteen jazz musicians who have made major contributions to the development of this form of music.