Chicago writer and radio personality Studs Terkel dies at 96
Wrote history from point of view of ordinary Americans
Last Updated: Friday, October 31, 2008 | 5:36 PM ET
CBC News
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and oral historian Studs Terkel shown in May 2007 has died. (Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press) Acclaimed Chicago author Studs Terkel died Friday at his home. He was 96.
Colleague and close friend Thom Clark says Terkel's family confirmed his death.
Terkel was a wise-cracking radio host with The Studs Terkel Program, a mix of jazz, folk music and conversation that aired on WFMT in Chicago between 1952 and 1997.
He developed interviewing and listening skills in the early days of TV in the 1950s and had guests such as Bob Dylan, Marlon Brando and Leonard Bernstein.
Terkel wrote his first book, Giants of Jazz, in 1957, but became well-known with later books as a historian who chronicled what the ordinary guy did while history was going on around him.
Relying substantially on oral history, he explored the Depression in 1970's Hard Times and chronicled how people felt about their jobs in Working.
In Division Street America, a 1967 book that made him a household name, he wrote about rich and poor along the same Chicago street, based on interviews he did with dozens of ordinary families.
The Good War, a 1985 book that won the Pulitzer Prize, gathers remembrances of the Second World War.
Born Louis Terkel on May 16, 1912, to a Russian-Jewish family in New York, he moved with his family to Chicago at age eight.
He has a degree from University of Chicago law school, but never practised law. That's where he got the nickname "Studs" from the Studs Lonigan trilogy by Chicago writer James T. Farrell.
He took a job in a writers project with the Works Progress Administration, writing plays and developing his acting skills.
Terkel worked on radio soap operas, in stage plays, as a sportscaster and had a radio program devoted to an eclectic mix of music, The Wax Museum.
In the early 1950s, he moved into TV, creating Stud's Place, a TV show set in tavern in which Terkel talked and listened to a range of guests.
Terkel became know for his lively conversation, but his outspoken politics made him enemies and his was among several Chicago-based programs forced off the air when TV became more commercial.
"I was blacklisted because I took certain positions on things and never retracted," Terkel once said, recalling his brush with McCarthyism. "I signed many petitions that were for unfashionable causes and never retracted."
He had a hard time finding work after that, but eventually found a home at a new fine arts station, WFMT, where he had a morning show.
Terkel was known for his keen curiosity and ability to get guests to open up, as well as his ability to make ordinary people tell stories as interesting as those of celebrities.
He juggled his daily radio shows and frequent public appearances with a steady stream of books, including Chicago, Race: What Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession, Coming of Age, The Story of Our Century by Those Who've Lived It and 1997's My American Century.
"I've always felt, in all my books, that there's a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence — providing they have the facts, providing they have the information," he said
His last book, P.S. Further Thoughts From a Lifetime of Listening, is scheduled for a November release.
Terkel is survived by his son, Dan.
