Studs Terkel

American broadcaster, oral historian, and author (1912–2008), Pulitzer Prize winner and longtime host of The Studs Terkel Program on Chicago's WFMT radio.

Louis "Studs" Terkel was one of the twentieth century's foremost oral historians, famous for turning the tape-recorded voices of ordinary Americans into landmark books such as Division Street: America, Hard Times, and Working. He won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1985 for "The Good War": An Oral History of World War Two. For decades he hosted a daily interview program on Chicago's WFMT, conducting thousands of wide-ranging conversations with writers, scientists, activists, and public figures.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: chronicler. On April 23, 1960, Terkel recorded a roughly hour-long WFMT radio conversation with R. Buckminster Fuller, letting Fuller expound at length on his ideas about science, design, and the geodesic dome. The interview survives in the Studs Terkel Radio Archive (held by the Chicago History Museum), placing Fuller within Terkel's vast recorded gallery of twentieth-century thinkers alongside figures such as Bertrand Russell, whom Terkel also interviewed. As chronicler, Terkel captured Fuller's voice and thought as spoken testimony rather than in print.

See Also

• R. Buckminster Fuller (R. Buckminster Fuller) — the central figure
• Bertrand Russell (Bertrand Russell) — another thinker interviewed by Terkel for WFMT

Sources

• R. Buckminster Fuller in conversation with Studs Terkel — WFMT / Studs Terkel Radio Archive, broadcast Apr. 23, 1960 (Chicago History Museum)