Exceprts From Wikipedia

On May 16, 2008, Studs Terkel will turn 96. His contributions to the popularization of the oral histories of working people are incalcuable. His books, his radio show in Chicago, and his political activism, have inspired large numbers of people in the United States and beyond. We share a bit of his background below.

Terkel was born in New York, New York to Russian Jewish parents, but at the age of eight, he moved with his parents to Chicago, Illinois, where he has spent most of his life. His father, Robert, was a tailor and his mother, Anna (Finkel) was a circus performer. He had three brothers Joe, John, and Horacio. From 1926 to 1936, his parents ran a rooming house that was a collecting point for people of all types. Terkel credits 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.

He joined the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers' Project in 1936, working in radio, doing work ranging from voicing soap opera productions and announcing news and sports, to presenting shows of recorded music and writing radio scripts and advertisements.

Terkel is well known for his radio program titled The Studs Terkel Program that aired on 98.7 WFMT Chicago between 1952 and 1997. The one-hour program appeared each weekday during all of that time.

Terkel is perhaps best known for his oral histories, such as the 1970 book Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, for which he assembled recollections of the Great Depression spanning the socioeconomic spectrum, from Okies, to prison inmates, to the wealthy. His 1974 book Working, in which (in the words of the subtitle) "People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do" was also highly acclaimed. (Working was made into a short-lived Broadway show in 1978 and telecast on PBS in 1982.)

Terkel won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for The Good War, which challenged the prevailing notion that, in contrast to the Vietnam War era, World War II was a time of unblemished national solidarity, goodwill, and unified purpose. In 1997 he was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1999 received the George Polk Career Award.