From the master of oral history, the classic on what Americans do for a living and how they feel about it.

Studs Terkel’s classic Working, first published in 1974, applied the methods of oral history to an exploration of the current moment: what jobs Americans do and how they feel about them. Terkel interviewed people from all walks of life, and the book reflects the variety of American work experiences, as teachers, hospital aides, autoworkers, waitresses, and gravediggers (for a start) talk about work. Some of their reflections, thirty years on, show us just how much the American work culture has changed since then: a switchboard operator tells about how she passes the time on slow night shifts (by listening on calls, among other things!), but it’s unlikely that someone in a similar job today ever has much down time in this era of “management by stress.”

But many of Terkel’s other interviewees share insights and preoccupations that will be instantly familiar—how to make meaning out of work that isn’t respected by the rest of society, feeling both happy and resentful when one’s children rise to a higher economic class, pride in one’s ability, and dealing with authority are just a few of the complicated topics these American workers explore. Working is a testament to Terkel’s renowned gift for eliciting searching, honest and sometimes unsettling answers.

At the time of its publication, social critic Marshall Berman compared Working to a popular folk song of the Popular Front Era, sung by Paul Robeson, which tells of the “everybody who’s nobody and the nobody who’s everybody,” and the comparison is still apt. Working is for anybody with ears to hear America talking.

Studs Terkel, prize-winning author of many books and a and radio broadcast personality, was born in 1912. His father, Samuel, was a tailor, and his mother, Anna (Finkel), was a seamstress. The family moved to Chicago in 1922 and opened a rooming house at Ashland and Flournoy on the near West side. From 1926 to 1936 they ran another rooming house, the Wells-Grand Hotel at Wells Street and Grand Avenue. Terkel credits his knowledge of the world to the tenants who gathered in the lobby of the hotel and the people who congregated in nearby Bughouse Square, a meeting place for workers, labor organizers, dissidents, the unemployed, and religious fanatics of many persuasions. In 1939 he married Ida Goldberg and had one son.