He received the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1985 for The Good War and is best remembered for his oral histories of common Americans, and for hosting a long-running radio show in Chicago.

[3] From 1926 to 1936, his parents ran a rooming house called the Wells-Grand Hotel that also served as a meeting place for people from all walks of life.

Terkel credited his understanding of humanity and social interaction to the tenants and visitors who gathered in the lobby there and the people who congregated in nearby Bughouse Square.

degree from the University of Chicago in 1934 (and was admitted to the Illinois Bar the following year), he decided that, instead of practicing law, he wanted to be a concierge at a hotel, and he soon joined a theater group.

On this program, he interviewed guests as diverse as Martin Luther King Jr., Leonard Bernstein, Mort Sahl, Bob Dylan, Alexander Frey, Dorothy Parker, Tennessee Williams, Jean Shepherd, Frank Zappa, and Big Bill Broonzy.

He followed it in 1967 with his first collection of oral histories, Division Street: America, with 70 people talking about the effect on the human spirit of living in an American metropolis.

[10] Having been blacklisted from working in television during the McCarthy era, I know the harm of government using private corporations to intrude into the lives of innocent Americans.

When the government uses the telephone companies to create massive databases of all our phone calls it has gone too far.The lawsuit was dismissed by Judge Matthew F. Kennelly on July 26, 2006.

In an interview in The Guardian celebrating his 95th birthday, Terkel discussed his own "diverse and idiosyncratic taste in music, from Bob Dylan to Alexander Frey, Louis Armstrong to Woody Guthrie".

[12] Terkel was a self-described agnostic,[13] which he jokingly defined as "a cowardly atheist" during a 2004 interview with Krista Tippett on American Public Media's Speaking of Faith.

[17] From a donation by Terkel, the Chicago History Museum, Library of Congress, and WFMT created the Studs Terkel Radio Archive[1], digitally preserving his entire interview archive − "a remarkably rich history of the ideas and perspectives of both common and influential people living in the second half of the 20th century," per the Library of Congress.

"[21] On September 5, 2019, podcast The Radio Diaries, produced by Radiotopia on PRX, released an episode called "The Working Tapes of Studs Terkel."

[33] Terkel, despite not being black, was inducted into Chicago State University's National Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent at the insistence of Professor Haki Madhubuti.