Studs's People

One day in 1974, I got a call from my agent.

"I've got an idea," she said. "What if you did a book of interviews on unemployment, like Studs Terkel's Working, only with people out of a job?" So I bought a tape recorder, tried my hand at "oral history" and found I loved the interview crucible, the savor of creating in collaboration as a long conversation clicks. I traveled around the country, and after some vicissitudes, Not Working was published in 1979. I stole not only Studs's technique and format but also his title. Whereupon he called me up and asked me to appear on his radio show.

Soon there we were, across a table in the WFMT studio, the celebrated author of Working interviewing the rookie author of Not Working, Studs voluble, fizzy with energy. He quickly zeroed in on something I had remarked upon: that no matter how people lose their job, even if they have been laid off with hundreds or thousands of others, they usually feel a sense of failure and shame, that somehow it is their fault. Studs saw the suffering in that, and saw that it stems, at least in part, from the American every-man-for-himself ethos we breathe in from the cradle. That fit with what I knew about Studs from reading his books and what comes through so strongly in his latest, the memoir Touch and Go: instinctive empathy wedded to a blazing sense of right and wrong.

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