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Artist:

Studs Terkel

Born:
May 16, 1912 in New York City

  • Genre: Blues
  • Instrument: Liner Notes, Recorder, Voices

Biography

Through his radio interviews and books, Studs Terkel has been called "the Walt Whitman of the radio waves" and referred to himself as "a guerrilla journalist with a tape recorder." Although Terkel continues to be associated with Chicago, he was born in New York City on May 16, 1912, the third son of Russian-Jewish parents. His family later moved to Chicago where his father worked as a tailor and then ran a boarding house for emigrants. After finishing high school, Terkel attended the University of Chicago where he received a law degree in 1934. Instead of practicing law, however, he worked as a radio show producer for the Federal Writers Project during the Depression and, in his spare time, acted in the Chicago Repertory Theatre. His nickname, Studs, was borrowed from the hero in James Farrell's Studs Lonigan. Terkel attempted to enlist in the army during World War II, but was turned down due to a perforated eardrum. He joined the Red Cross instead, but was not allowed to travel overseas, he later learned, due to his left-wing political views. Terkel worked in television in the late 1940s, but was blacklisted in 1953 following an investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAAC). Despite pressure from the committee, Terkel refused to provide information on other left-wing activists. He found employment at the Chicago Sunday Times, writing a jazz column, and appeared in a theatrical version of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. In 1956 he authored his first book, Giants of Jazz. In 1952 Terkel began hosting Studs Terkel Almanac on WFMT in Chicago (later to be The Studs Terkel Program). It was a music program in the beginning, and interviews were only later added to the show. Conducting interviews, however, would prove Terkel's niche, and he began to interview anyone who visited the studio. Terkel filled his program with actors and musicians, introducing his audiences to the personalities and music of greats like Woody Guthrie and Mahalia Jackson. In the 1960s, Terkel extended his tape-recorded interviews into the arena of oral history. In 1967 he published Division Street: America, a series of interviews with 70 Chicago residents. He followed in 1970 with Hard Times, a book documenting many Americans' experiences during the Depression, and in 1974 Working, interviews with professionals from brick masons to prostitutes. Terkel published American Dreams: Lost and Found in 1980, and received a Pulitzer Prize for The Good War in 1985. Terkel's other works include, The Great Divide (1988), Race (1992), Coming of Age (1995), Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times (1995), My American Century (1998), and Will the Circle Be Unbroken? (2001). Current American radio, from Terry Gross' Fresh Air to Ira Glass' This American Life, is impossible to imagine without Terkel's contribution to the format. "Terkel has built a career on the hunch that pretty much everyone might be worth trying to talk to...," wrote Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian, "most of all the teeming, unexamined mass of American life...." ~ Ronnie D. Lankford Jr., All Music Guide

Similar Artists:

Garrison Keillor

Worked With:

Muddy Waters
 
 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Studs Terkel

(born May 16, 1912, New York, N.Y., U.S.) U.S. radio personality and author. He moved with his family to Chicago when he was eight. Terkel gave up a legal career to become a radio disk jockey and interviewer, exposure that led to his own television show in 1950. In 1953, blacklisted from television for his leftist leanings, he returned to radio, continuing at the same station for 45 years. His books include Division Street (1967), about Chicago; Hard Times (1970), about the Depression; Working (1974), on Americans and their jobs; The Good War, on World War II (1984, Pulitzer Prize); and Race (1992), on American feelings about race.

For more information on Studs Terkel, visit Britannica.com.

 
Works: Works by Studs Terkel
(b. 1912)

1970Hard Times: An Oral History of the Depression. The Chicago radio and television commentator achieves his first major success, using his characteristic interviewing technique. He would follow it with a succession of well-regarded oral histories, including Working (1974), Talking to Myself (1977), and The Good War (1984).
1984The Good War: An Oral History of World War II. Terkel weaves together the testimony of many witnesses to, and participants in, World War II to create a kind of collective first-person account of an event that defined a generation. It wins the Pulitzer Prize.

 
Quotes By: Studs Terkel

Quotes:

"Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of self. Here I be. Not for long, but here I be. In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own."

"Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirits."

 
Wikipedia: Studs Terkel

Louis "Studs" Terkel (born May 16, 1912) is an American author, historian, actor, and broadcaster.

Early life and career

Terkel was born in New York, NY, but at the age of two, 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. In 1939, he married Ida Goldberg and had one son, Paul (also known as Dan), named after Paul Robeson.

Terkel graduated from the University of Chicago in 1934 with a law degree but says instead of practicing, he wanted to be a concierge at a hotel and also joined a theater group. [1] He joined the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers' Project, 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. He interviewed guests as diverse as Bob Dylan, Leonard Bernstein and Alexander Frey.

Terkel published his first book, Giants of Jazz, in 1956. He followed it with a number of other books, most focusing on the history of the United States people, relying substantially on oral history. He also serves as a Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at the Chicago History Museum.

He appeared in the movie based on the Black Sox Scandal, Eight Men Out. He played newspaper reporter Hugh Fullerton, who tries to uncover the White Sox players fixing to throw the 1919 World Series.

Studs Terkel got his nickname when he was acting in a play with another person named Louis. In order to keep the two straight, the director gave Terkel the nickname Studs after the fictional character Studs Lonigan, of James T. Farrell's trilogy, which Terkel was reading at the time. Terkel has never learned to drive and has long suffered from ommatophobia (fear of eyes).

Terkel is perhaps best known for his oral histories, such as the 1970 book , 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. (In 1978 Working was made into a short-lived Broadway show and in 1982 telecast on PBS.) 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.

Later life

In 2004, Terkel received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award as well as an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Colby College.

In August 2005, Terkel underwent successful open-heart surgery. At 93 years old, he was one of the oldest people to undergo this form of surgery and doctors reported his recovery to be remarkable for someone of his advanced age.

On May 22, 2006, Terkel, along with other plaintiffs, filed a suit in federal district court against AT&T to stop the telecommunications carrier from giving customer phone records to the National Security Agency without a court order.[1]


“ Having been blacklisted from working in television during the McCarthy era, I know the harm of government using private corporations to intrude into the lives of innocent Americans. When government uses the telephone companies to create massive databases of all our phone calls it has gone too far. ”

The suit was dismissed by Judge Matthew F. Kennelly on July 26 2006. Judge Kennelly cited a "state secrets privilege" designed to protect national security from being harmed by lawsuits.[2]

Terkel has completed a new personal memoir entitled Touch and Go, to be published in the fall of 2007.[3]

Selected works

  • Giants of Jazz - 1957
  • - 1967
  • Hard Times - 1970
  • Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do - 1974
  • Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times - 1977
  • The Good War - 1984
  • Chicago - 1986
  • The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream - 1988
  • - 1992
  • - 1995
  • My American Century - 1997
  • - 1999
  • Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Reflections on Death, Rebirth and Hunger for a Faith - 2001
  • - 2003
  • And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey - 2005

Quotes

On being born in 1912... "As the Titanic went down, I came up..."

"I hope for peace and sanity - it's the same thing."

"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."

"With optimism, you look upon the sunny side of things. People say, 'Studs, you're an optimist.' I never said I was an optimist. I have hope because what's the alternative to hope? Despair? If you have despair, you might as well put your head in the oven."

"That's why I wrote this book: to show how these people can imbue us with hope. I read somewhere that when a person takes part in community action, his health improves. Something happens to him or to her biologically. It's like a tonic."

"The older you are, the freer you are, as long as you last." Studs Turkel at 95

"Take it easy, but take it." For years, the sign-off line on his WFMT radio show

References

  1. ^ Ammeson, Jane. "Storytelling with Studs Terkel", Chicago Life. 


External links


Persondata
NAME Terkel, Studs
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Terkel, Louis (birth name)
SHORT DESCRIPTION American author, historian and broadcaster
DATE OF BIRTH May 16, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City, New York, United States
DATE OF DEATH living
PLACE OF DEATH

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

 
 

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Copyrights:

Artist. Copyright © 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. Content provided by All Music Guide ® , a trademark of All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved.  Read more
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Works. The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Quotes By. Copyright © 2008 QuotationsBook.com. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Studs Terkel".  Read more

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