A Pulitzer Prize winner interviews workers, from policemen to piano tuners: "Magnificent . . . To read it is to hear America talking." — The Boston GlobeA National Book Award Finalist and New York Times bestsellerStuds Terkel's classic oral history Working is a compelling look at jobs and the people who do them. Consisting of over one hundred interviews with everyone from a gravedigger to a studio head, this book provide...

" Hard Times doesn't 'render' the time of the Depression or historicize about it—it is that time, its lingo, mood, its tragic and hilarious stories." —Arthur MillerFirst published in 1970, Studs Terkel's bestselling Hard Times has been called "a huge anthem in praise of the American spirit" (Saturday Review) and "an invaluable record" (The New York Times)

The renowned oral historian interviews ordinary people about facing mortality: "It's the unguarded voices he presents that stay with you." — The New York TimesIn this book, the Pulitzer Prize winner and National Book Award finalist Studs Terkel, author of the New York Times bestseller Working, turns to the ultimate human experience: death. Here a wide range of people address the unknowable culmination of our lives, the possibilities of an...

The National Book Award winner’s classic oral history of Americans’ working lives—and the inspiration for Barack Obama’s new Netflix series about work in the twenty-first centuryFew books have captured the American experience with such raw, unfiltered power. First published in 1974, Working is Studs Terkel’s landmark work of oral history, a sweeping, intimate portrait of labor in America told entirely through the voices of those who live it.Drawn f...

The first revised and updated version of this 1970’s cult classic. A rousing musical with a cast of twenty, Working is for anyone who has ever punched a clock, a cow or a supervisor - or wanted to.An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Eileen Barnett, Orson Bean, Harry Groener, Kaitlin Hopkins, Michael Kostroff, Kenna Ramsey, Vickilyn Reynolds, Vincent Tumeo and B.J. Ward.

The complete audio documentary as broadcast by NPR, plus exclusive bonus interviews and commentary.In the early 1970’s, author and radio host Studs Terkel went around the country with a reel-to-reel tape recorder interviewing people about their jobs. The result was the bestselling book Working. The great interviewer of his day, Terkel celebrated the uncelebrated, and Working elevated the stories of ordinary people and their daily lives.For...

At nearly ninety-five, Studs Terkel has written about everyone's life, it seems, but his own. In Touch and Go, he offers a memoir that—embodying the spirit of the man himself—is youthful, vivacious, and enormous fun.Terkel begins by taking us back to his early childhood with his father, mother, and two older brothers, describing the hectic life of a family trying to earn a living in Chicago. He then goes on to recall his own experiences—as a poll watcher charged with steal...

Winner of the Alabama Library Author AwardOutside the Magic Circle tells the remarkable story of Virginia Foster Durr, a southern white woman born into privilige who (along with her husband Clifford Durr, a lawyer best known for defending Rosa Parks), nonetheless devoted her life to Civil Rights activism.Outside the Magic Circle is the powerful and deeply personal autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr, a Southern woman who...

First published in 1970, Studs Terkel's bestselling Hard Times has been called “a huge anthem in praise of the American spirit” (Saturday Review) and “an invaluable record” (The New York Times). With his trademark grace and compassion, Terkel evokes a mosaic of memories from those who were richest to those who were destitute: politicians, businessmen, artists and writers, racketeers, speakeasy operators, strikers, impoverished farmers, people who were just kids, ...

From hard scrabble origins on the Plains of North Dakota, to longshoremen organizing on Manhattan’s West Side docks, to living the life of a Bohemian poet in Los Angeles and beyond, Thomas McGrath’s literary aspirations took him far from his humble beginnings.For over six decades, McGrath created poems based largely on the themes of love, work, and political justice. His love of the prairie and his early years on a working farm were central to his life. The virtues of the agrarian communit...

In a blend of history, memoir, and photography, the Pulitzer Prize winner paints a vivid portrait of this extraordinary American city.Chicago was home to the country's first skyscraper (a ten-story building built in 1884), and marks the start of the famed Route 66. It is also the birthplace of the remote control (Zenith) and the car radio (Motorola), and the first major American city to elect a woman (Jane Byrne) and then an African American man (Harold Washington)...

A landmark reissue of Studs Terkel’s classic microcosm of America, with a new foreword by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and co-creator of the Division Street Revisited podcast“Remarkable. . . . Division Street astonishes, dismays, exhilarates.” —The New York TimesWhen New Press founder André Schiffrin first published Division Street in 1967, Studs Terkel’s reputation as America’s ...