Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970)
Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974)
Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times (1977)
American Dreams: Lost and Found (1983)
The Good War (1984)
Chicago (1986)
The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream (1988)
Race: What Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession (1992)
Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who’ve Lived It (1995)
My American Century (1997)
The Spectator: Talk About Movies and Plays With Those Who Make Them (1999)
Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Reflections on Death, Rebirth and Hunger for a Faith (2001)
Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times (2003)
And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey (2005)
Touch and Go (2007)
P.S. Further Thoughts From a Lifetime of Listening (2008)
Chicago is America's Dream, writ large. And flamboyantly.
Terkel, the master of oral history, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985 for chronicling World War II in The Good War. Born in New York to a tailor and a seamstress, Terkel, at the age of eight, moved with his family to Chicago, where he spent most of his life. In his teens, his parents ran a rooming house that was a collecting point for people of all types. Terkel credited 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. He never tired of the stories of "ordinary" people and in his second book (and first book of oral history interviews), Division Street: America, a metaphorical title that derived from Chicago's true Division Street, Terkel captured 20th century urban life as told to him by those ordinary folks living in and around Chicago. Division Street set the pattern his subsequent books would follow and established Terkel's reputation as the world's foremost oral historian.
