To be remembered was the wish, spoken and unspoken, of the heroes and heroines of this book.” Perhaps immortality, too, is part of the quest. In one of his most famous books, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, Terkel distilled the essence of what he was hearing about jobs from those interviews: “It is about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying. But thank God for that mindless job, because without it there’d be no bread on the table at home. Jobs that they prayed their children wouldn’t have to endure to make a living. One of the themes that reoccurs regularly in the interviews is that of people feeling that their jobs were mindless, repetitive, boring, and most certainly a job, as more than a few said, fit only for a robot. Terkel was his own algorithm, and he put the best of himself into a bunch of books on people, their jobs, how they worked and why. The interviewees ranged from titans like Simone de Beauvoir, Bertrand Russell, and JK Galbraith to simple, ordinary working folk like Hobart Foote of Gary, Indiana.ĪI, with a neat algorithm that could parse audiotape, might well tell us lots of interesting things about these people and the patterns of their work lives.

That’s about 200 interviews a year for over four decades.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer asked a lifetime of questions resulting in 9,000 audiotapes for his Studs Terkel Show that aired over radio station WFMT in Chicago. Studs Terkel spent forty-five years of his life interviewing working people about their jobs.

Working by Studs Terkel