Idaho Commission for Libraries

Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do by Studs Terkel

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Book Summary | Author Biography | Bibliography | Other links

Summary

Studs Terkel interviewed hundreds of workers from all walks of life from waitresses to executives to find out what people think about work. The resulting collection of 135 interviews are loosely organized under various topics. One of the themes to emerge from the book is how people see their attitudes toward work have changed. Terkel's improvisatory writing style has been compared to jazz riffs as he gives voice to America's workers telling their stories.

Biography of Studs Terkel

Louis (Studs) Terkel was born in New York City in 1912. When he was eight, he moved to Chicago where his mother ran a hotel. He was shaped by the Great Depression and the international socialist movements in the 1930s and 40s, out of which Terkel developed his interest in investigating "the common people" who infuse American society with vitality and creativity. Terkel's famous interviews arose out of his job as a disk jockey when he sometimes interviewed jazzmen and folk singers. His radio program was carried on WFMT in Chicago for forty-five years. In 1985, he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Good War. Terkel currently works as writer-in-residence at the Chicago History Society cataloging his audiotapes from the thousands of interviews he has done over the years.

Sources: see web site links below

Bibliography

• Giants of Jazz (1957)
• Division Street: America (1967)
• Hard Times: An Oral History of the Depression in America (1970)
• Working (1974)
• Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times (1977)
• American Dreams: Lost and Found (1980)
• The Good War: An Oral History of World War II (1984)
• Chicago (1986)
• The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream (1988)
• Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel about the American Obsession (1992)
• Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who've Lived It (1995)
• My American Century (1997)
• The Spectator (1999)

Biography

• Studs Terkel: A Life in Words by Tony Parker (1996)

Web Sites

Read a review of Working: "Everybody Who's Nobody and the Nobody Who's Everybody," by Marshall Berman, March 24, 1974, The New York Times: www.nytimes.com/books/99/09/26/specials/terkel-working.html

Read "Listener, Talker, Now Literary Lion: Its Official" by Mel Gussow, The New York Times, June 17, 1997, [ www.nytimes.com/books/99/09/26/specials/terkel-lion.html ], an article written when Terkel was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Read reviews of Terkel's books and articles about Terkel from the archives of The New York Times web site: www.nytimes.com/books/99/09/26/specials/terkel.html

Links to various articles about Studs Terkel www.geocities.com/Heartland/3511/FAMOUS/Studs.htm

Read "Working Studs: An Interview with the Master Worker-Interviewer on his Own Craft," by Hank Hoffman, 1999, on the New Haven Advocate web site: www.newhavenadvocate.com/articles/working4/html

Read a June 28, 2000, review written by Ann Marlowe for the Salon.com web site of Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs at the Turn of the Millennium, edited by John Boew, Marisa Bowe and Sabin Streeter, which has been called an update of Studs Terkel's Working.www.salon.com/books/review/2000/06/28/gig/index.html

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