Division Street is the book that first made Studs Terkel's reputation as America's foremost oral historian, as "one of those rare thinkers who is actually willing to go out and talk to the incredible people of this country". Viewing the inhabitants of a single city, Chicago, as a microcosm of the nation at large, Terkel chronicles the thoughts and feelings of some seventy people from widely varying backgrounds in terms of class, race, and personal history. From a mother and son who migrated from Appalachia to a Native American boilerman, from a streetwise ex-gang leader to a liberal police officer, from the poorest African Americans to the richest socialites, these unique accounts form a multifaceted collage that defies any simple stereotype of America.

A New York Times bestseller when it was first published in 1995, Coming of Age presents an astonishing portrait of American life and the experience of aging in the twentieth century, drawn from the stories of seventy-four very different people, the youngest of whom is seventy and the oldest ninety-nine. Inspiring in the honesty of their voices and their lack of nostalgia or illusions, these are people with the widest range of experiences from all around the country; many were at the vanguard of their movements, whether of trade unions, gay liberation, or the arts. They remind us what we once were, what we have lost, and the extraordinary extent to which we've been transformed as a society over the last hundred odd years.

A half-century of previously unpublished interviews with legendary musicians, in a brand-new book from America's foremost oral historian "I'm one of these people that thinks that everybody has certain gifts, you know, when they're born I used to play the guitar when I was ten, you know. So I figured maybe my thing is playing the guitar, maybe that's my little gift."Bob Dylan, interviewed in 1963, from And They All Sang Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Pulitzer Prize-winning oral historian Studs Terkel hosted a legendary daily radio program on WFMT in Chicago, presenting listeners with his inimitable take on a wide range of music from classical opera to jazz, blues, gospel, folk, and rock. His latest work of oral history shows us this completely different side of Studs Terkelthat of a brilliant and far-ranging musicologist. And They All Sang features over forty conversations with some of the greatest musical luminaries of the past century: rock icons Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin, influential folk singer Pete Seeger, jazz geniuses Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, composers Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, classical musicians Andres Segovia and Ravi Shankar, legendary opera divas Rosa Raisa and Edith Mason, and gospel giants Thomas A. Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson. Transcending genres and generations, Studs Terkel goes behind the music and doesn't miss a beat. Musicians featured include: Marian Anderson, Louis Armstrong, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Bob Dylan, Dizzy Gillespie, Woody Guthrie, Mahalia Jackson, Janis Joplin, Keith Jarrett, Alan Lomax, Catherine Malfitano, Jean Ritchie, Pete Seeger, Ravi Shankar, Richard Tucker.

Millions of Studs Terkel fans have come to know the prizewinning oral historian through his landmark books—“The Good War”, Hard Times, Working, Will the Circle Be Unbroken?, and many others. Few people realize, however, that much of Studs’s best work was not collected into these thematic volumes and has, in fact, never been published. P.S. brings together these significant and deeply enjoyable writings for the first time. The pieces in P.S. reflect Studs’s wide-ranging interests and travels, as well as his abiding connection to his hometown, Chicago. Here we have a fascinating conversation with James Baldwin, possibly Studs’s finest interview with an author; pieces on the colorful history and culture of Chicago; vivid portraits of Studs’s heroes and cohorts (including an insightful and still timely interview with songwriter Yip Harburg, known for his “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime”); and the transcript of Studs’s famous broadcast on the Depression, the very moving essence of what was to become Hard Times. A fitting postscript to a lifetime of listening, P.S. is a truly Terkelesque display of Studs’s extraordinary range of talent and the amazing people he found to talk to.

The author shares his memories of growing up in Chicago and anecdotes about the city and its inhabitants.

The name Studs was a nick-name derived from the function character Studs Lonigan in James T. Farrell's 1920s trilogy. Studs Terkel is one of the great oral historians of this century. His literature speaks to and for the common man. He was born in 1903 and throughout his life he never drove a car but preferred to take a bus and share life with the regular people.Studs started his career in the early '50s doing interviews for radio WFMT in Chicago. By the mid '60s his interviews were being noticed and his first oral history was published. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1985 book The Good War. He has been inducted into the Academy of Arts and Letters and has received an award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation.In best-selling books that began in 1970 with Hard Times, and a legendary radio show that started on WFMT in Chicago, Studs Terkel told the tales that real people had told him. IDEAS host Paul Kennedy interviews Studs Terkel.

Memoirs, Autobiography, Oral History, Literary Studies