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.

Includes material on Leon Trotsky, Isadora Duncan, John Reed, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Vladimir Lenin, William Jennings Bryan, Emma Goldman, George Bernard Shaw, Theodore Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover, Tito, Benito Mussolini, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Ralph Nader.

"A memoir exploring the author's father's love of wine" --

Gerald Holton uses the life and work of our century's greatest scientist to warn against today's gathering Romantic rebellion, one in which science is blamed for all our social ills, and in which reason is being replaced by New Age 'ways of knowing.' Through his rich exploration of Einstein's thought, the author shows how the best science depends on great intuitive leaps of imagination, and how science is indeed the creative expression of the traditions of Western civilization. Wide-ranging and forceful, this book is a must reading for anyone interested in the place of science in our world.

A.J. Liebling was one of America's finest and most influential journalists. Reprinted here in full The Telephone Booth Indian (1942) - a witty portrait of an unusual group of entrepreneurs. These Manhattan lowlifes conduct unsavory business from the telephones in the lobbies of office buildings. The Second City (1952) - a chronicle of life in the windy city as seen by an outsider, a New Yorker and avowed Francofile.'The Honest The Life and Times of Colonel John R. Stingo (1953) - a fond biography of Colonel Stingo, raconteur and track denizen of Runyonesque proportions.'The Earl of Louisiana' (1961) - which captures the essence of a uniquely American character, Earl Long."The Jollity Building' (1962) - Otherwise known as the Brill Building, which picks up Liebling's portrait of Manhattan's West Side begun in 'The Telephone Booth Indian'. Here are hacks and hustlers scrambling over one another, vying for the 'big break.'In all five volumes, both the exalted and obscure are treated with the insight, candor, and wit that are the hallmarks of Liebling's writing.

“I have read all of Daniel Aaron’s books, and admired them, but in The Americanist I believe he has composed an intellectual and social memoir for which he will be remembered. His self-portrait is marked by personal tact and admirable restraint: he is and is not its subject. The Americanist is a vision of otherness: literary and academic friends and acquaintances, here and abroad. Eloquently phrased and free of nostalgia, it catches a lost world that yet engendered much of our own.” —Harold Bloom “ The Americanist is the absorbing intellectual autobiography of Daniel Aaron, who is the leading proponent and practitioner of American Studies. Written with grace and wit, it skillfully blends Daniel Aaron’s personal story with the history of the field he has done so much to create. This is a first-rate book by a first-rate scholar.” —David Herbert Donald, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University The Americanist is author and critic Daniel Aaron’s anthem to nearly a century of public and private life in America and abroad. Aaron, who is widely regarded as one of the founders of American Studies, graduated from the University of Michigan, received his Ph.D. from Harvard, and taught for over three decades each at Smith College and Harvard. Aaron writes with unsentimental nostalgia about his childhood in Los Angeles and Chicago and his later academic career, which took him around the globe, often in the role of America’s accidental yet impartial critic. When Walt Whitman, whom Aaron frequently cites as a touchstone, wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes,” he could have been describing Daniel Aaron—the consummate erudite and Renaissance individual whose allegiance to the truth always outweighs mere partisan loyalty. Not only should Aaron’s book stand as a resplendent and summative work from one of the finest thinkers of the last hundred years, it also succeeds on its own as a first-rate piece of literature, on a par with the writings of any of its subjects. The Americanist is a veritable Who’s Who of twentieth-century writers Aaron interviewed, interacted with, or otherwise encountered throughout his life: Ralph Ellison, Robert Frost, Lillian Hellman, Richard Hofstadter, Alfred Kazin, Sinclair Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge, John Crowe Ransom, Upton Sinclair, Edmund Wilson, Leonard Woolf, and W. B. Yeats, to name only a few. Aaron’s frank and personal observations of these literary lights make for lively reading. As well, scattered throughout The Americanist are illuminating portraits of American presidents living and passed—miniature masterworks of astute political observation that offer dazzlingly fresh approaches to well-trod subjects.