Such a process does not merely record the details that keep people's minds busy, it gives them value. It is the rich art of taking the vernacular, and making it eternal. People call Terkel's business 'oral history', but it is more like the weaving of a fabulous verbal tapestry, the threads of which are human preoccupations. It is a vivid record of an America which, for the most part, is now distant if not passed away along with Terkel himself. His book Coming of Age: the History of our Century by Those Who've Lived It (1995), was made up of interviews with elderly people. Terkel's obsessive interest in the propulsion of people's lives was at its most curious and passionate - and his subjects at their most brilliantly articulate - when he was dealing with everyday people, from whatever background: carpenters, judges, hub-cap fitters, priests, admirals, sharecroppers, models, signalmen, tennis players, war veterans and cooks. He even called his 1973 autobiography Talking to Myself.īut this distinction did much more for the archives of history than bequeath unrepeatable recordings of the great, the good and the gregarious.

He was the world's greatest - and loudest-mouthed - listener.

He was maestro of that most precious craft in the practice of both journalism and history: listening. The names of his guests, written in magic marker on the side of each tape, constitute the recent history not only of America but of the world: Simone de Beauvoir, Margot Fonteyn, Arthur Miller, JK Galbraith, Tennessee Williams, Andrés Segovia, Margaret Mead, Leonard Bernstein, Jacob Bronowski and so on - including Bertrand Russell, recorded at the age of 90 during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.Īs you listen, you know in your bones that each person has never told their story as cogently or as fully before and will never do so again, for that was Terkel's art.

Studs terkel working interviews