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Louis Terkel |
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"Next to Richard Nixon, the person whose life has been most dramatically affected by the tape recorder is Studs Terkel," according to Paul Gray in Time. For some two decades, Terkel has been the sympathetic ear to the American people, devoting several of his books to their intimate, revealing, first-person narratives. Armed with his tape machine, Terkel travels cross-country to get his interviews. His subjects speak out on topics as distinct as the Great Depression, World War II, and their jobs and as nebulous as their definition of the American Dream. Some of Terkel's interviews are with celebrities, but his most remembered--and many say his best--are with "real people." "I celebrate the non-celebrated," the author once told Philadelphia Bulletin contributor Lewis Beale. "I've found that average people want to talk about themselves, their hopes, dreams, aspirations, provided they sense that you're interested in what they're saying." And, as Terkel explained in a 1985 talk to the Friends of Libraries U.S.A., he has also discovered that "the average American has an indigenous intelligence, a native wit.
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