STUDS TERKEL:STUDS TERKEL - master chronicler of American life in the 20th century, veteran radical and vibrant soul - has died, aged 96. To register him as "writer and broadcaster" would be like calling Louis Armstrong a "trumpeter" or the Empire State Building an "office block". Strictly and sparsely speaking, it is true.
He is best known to Americans as the voice that asked the questions on the Studs Terkel Showwhich ran for 45 years, syndicated from downtown Chicago's WFMT studios.
The 9,000 tapes of his interviews take up rack after rack at WFMT. The names of his guests, written in magic marker on the side of each tape, constitute the recent history not only of America but of the world: Simone de Beauvoir, Margot Fonteyn, Arthur Miller, JK Galbraith, Tennessee Williams, Andres Segovia, Margaret Mead, Leonard Bernstein and Bertrand Russell.
As you listen, you know in your bones that each person has never told their story as cogently or as fully before and will never do so again, for that was Terkel's art. He was maestro of that most precious craft in the practice of both journalism and history: listening.
He was the world's greatest - and loudest-mouthed - listener. He even called his 1973 autobiography Talking to Myself.People call Terkel's business "oral history", but it is more like the weaving of a fabulous verbal tapestry. It is the rich art of taking the vernacular and making it eternal.
Terkel was born in New York the year the Titanic sank, and his family moved to Chicago when he was nine. His real name was Louis; "Studs" came from Studs Lonigan, title of a Chicago 1930s novel by James T Farrell.
His mother Annie opened a boarding hotel for migrant workers, by whom the young boy was captivated. Terkel went to study law at Chicago University, graduating in 1934.
A perforated eardrum saw him drafted during the second World War into the remarkable Works Project Administration scheme, assigned to chart the nooks, crannies, ways and means of his beloved Chicago.
The war over, Terkel became involved in radical theatre and radio soap operas, playing bit parts - "usually criminals or gangsters". He also worked as a DJ, playing jazz, blues, folk and opera.
With the advent of television, Terkel was allocated his own chat show in 1945, Studs's Place, set in a Chicago diner, but it was terminated when his political views came to the attention of HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, which shared the anti-communist views of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
The committee's veto sent Terkel back to radio. He heard Woody Guthrie on air one day, asked what station he was listening to and the answer was WFMT. There he went in 1953 and there he stayed.
While celebrities graced his programme, ordinary Americans populated his books. The first publication was Division Street: America(1966), about race in Chicago. The white Appalachian hillbillies and the black Mississippi sharecroppers did not meet on the city's streets, but they did in Terkel's book, explaining their views of themselves and of each other.
Hard Times(1970) looked back on the depression.
But the most bountiful harvest of humanity had by then been gathered in Working(1974). Terkel won a Pulitzer prize for these stories, like that of Babe Secoli the supermarket checker, who described customers engaged in something less like shopping than dodgem cars with trolleys, and garbage man Nick Salerno, discoursing on his long experience of how people pack their rubbish
More books followed including American Dreams: Lost and Found(1981), including a remarkable interview with a former president of the Ku Klux Klan, CP Ellis.
His broadcasts finished in 1998, but the books continued, including a memoir, Touch and Go(2007), and - still to come - PS Further Thoughts From a Lifetime of Listening. His son Dan survives him.
• Studs (Louis) Terkel, broadcaster and oral historian, born May 16th, 1912; died October 31st, 2008.