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Studs Terkel

1912–2008 · 96 years Specialist

A Chicago broadcaster who let ordinary Americans do the talking

Portrait of Studs Terkel — New photo — 1979 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Studs Terkel was born Louis Terkel in New York City and moved to Chicago at eight, when his parents took over the Wells-Grand Hotel, a rooming house whose residents — union organizers, cranks, drifters — became his first education in how people talked. He earned a law degree from the University of Chicago in 1934, passed the bar, then never practiced, drifting instead into Depression-era radio: soap-opera villains, sports announcing, a WPA Federal Writers' Project post. During a stage production, a director needing to tell him apart from another actor named Louis renamed him after Studs Lonigan, the fictional Chicago tough in the James T. Farrell novel he was reading, and the name stuck.

Terkel hosted The Studs Terkel Program on Chicago's WFMT for 45 years starting in 1952, interviewing thousands of people — musicians, writers, laborers, the famous and the unknown — with the same unhurried curiosity. Starting with Division Street: America in 1967, he turned that method into oral-history books built from other people's voices, lightly edited: Hard Times on the Depression, Working on ordinary jobs, and The Good War on World War II, which won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. He interviewed a 21-year-old Bob Dylan in 1963 and Martin Luther King Jr. that same decade, treated a steelworker's account of a shift with the same seriousness as a senator's, and built the largest first-person archive of twentieth-century American work and memory any one person compiled.

The voice that made Terkel famous for listening to everyone nearly ended his career for refusing to name names. He signed petitions and joined groups later flagged as Communist fronts, declined to disavow any of it when pressed, and was blacklisted from network television in the early 1950s, losing his national platform for years before local radio brought him back. He kept his convictions and softened almost nothing about them afterward, saying decades later he had no regrets about the blacklist years. His marriage to social worker Ida Goldberg lasted 60 years until her death in 1999; finishing his memoir without her to read it first, he wrote, was among the hardest parts of the grief that followed.

Terkel worked almost until the end, publishing his final book, P.S.: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening, in 2008, the year he died in his Chicago home on October 31 after complications from a fall. Chicago named a park after him, and WFMT digitized decades of his broadcasts into the Studs Terkel Radio Archive, putting thousands of interviews online for free. Oral history existed as a discipline before him, but Terkel turned it into a form other writers could imitate commercially and critically, and historians now cite Working and Hard Times as primary sources in their own right, not just popular books about the past.

Lifespan

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Studs Terkel's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Division Street: America book 1967
Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression book 1970
Working book
Oral histories of ordinary jobs, later adapted into a Broadway musical 1974
The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two book
Won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction 1984
The Studs Terkel Program other
45 years of daily interviews on WFMT 1952

Life in brief

with age at each point

May 16, 1912 aged 0 Born in New York City to Russian Jewish immigrant parents
1920 aged ~8 Family moves to Chicago
1934 aged ~22 Earns a law degree from the University of Chicago
1939 aged ~27 Marries Ida Goldberg
1952 aged ~40 Begins The Studs Terkel Program on WFMT
1967 aged ~55 Publishes Division Street: America, his first oral history
1985 aged ~73 Wins the Pulitzer Prize for The Good War
October 31, 2008 aged 96 Dies at home in Chicago after complications from a fall