Studs Terkel, American Treasure, Dies at 96
I haven’t read enough of Studs work and I don’t know anyone who has.
“It was those loners — argumentative ones, deceptively quiet ones, the talkers and the walkers — who, always engaged in something outside themselves, unintentionally became my mentors”
Terkel wrote in “Touch and Go.”
Studs Terkel, ground-breaking U.S. oral historian, dies at 96
International Herald Tribune | By William Grimes | Sunday, November 2, 2008
Studs Terkel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose searching interviews with ordinary Americans helped establish oral history as a serious genre and who for decades was the voluble host of a popular radio show in Chicago, died Friday at his home in Chicago. He was 96.
His death was confirmed by Lois Baum, a friend and longtime colleague at WFMT radio.
In his oral histories, which he called guerrilla journalism, Terkel relied on his enthusiastic but gentle interviewing style to elicit, in rich detail, the experiences and thoughts of his fellow citizens. Over the decades, he developed a continuous narrative of great historic moments sounded by an American chorus in the native vernacular.
“Division Street: America” (1966), his first best seller and the first in a triptych of tape-recorded works, explored the urban conflicts of the 1960s. Its success led to “Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression” (1970) and “Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do” (1974).
“‘The Good War’: An Oral History of World War II,” won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.
In “Talking to Myself” (1977), Terkel turned the microphone on himself to produce an engaging memoir, and in “Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession” (1992) and “Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who’ve Lived It” (1995), he reached for his ever-present tape recorder for interviews on race relations in the United States and the experience of growing old.
Although detractors derided him as a sentimental populist whose views were simplistic, Terkel was widely credited with transforming oral history into a popular literary form. In 1985, a reviewer for The Financial Times characterized Terkel’s books as “completely free of sociological claptrap, armchair revisionism and academic moralizing.”
The elfin, amiable Terkel was a gifted and seemingly tireless interviewer who elicited provocative insights and colorful, detailed personal histories from a broad mix of people. “The thing I’m able to do, I guess, is break down walls,” he once told an interviewer. “If they think you’re listening, they’ll talk. It’s more of a conversation than an interview.”
Terkel succeeded as an interviewer in part because he believed most people had something to say worth hearing. “The average American has an indigenous intelligence, a native wit. It’s only a question of piquing that intelligence.”
In the late 1930s, while acting in the theater, Terkel dropped his given name, Louis, and adopted the name Studs, from another colorful Chicagoan, James T. Farrell’s fictional Studs Lonigan.