Studs Terkel’s Chicago

NEW ILLUSTRATED EDITION The classic homage to one of America’s greatest cities, by the celebrated oral historian and cultural icon, the late Studs Terkel

“I have struck a city—a real city—and they call it Chicago.” —Rudyard Kipling

In the tradition of E.B. White’s bestselling Here Is New York, here is a tribute to the “Second City”—part history, part memoir, and 100 percent Studs Terkel—infused with anecdotes, memories, and reflections that celebrate the great city of Chicago.

Chicago was home to the country’s first skyscraper (a ten-story building built in 1884) and marks the start of the famed “Route 66.” It was also the birthplace of the remote control (Zenith) and the car radio (Motorola), and the first major American city to elect a woman (Jane Byrne) and then an African American man (Harold Washington) as mayor. Its literary and journalistic history is just as dazzling, featuring Nelson Algren, Mike Royko, and Sara Paretsky. From Al Capone to the street riots during the Democratic National Convention in 1968, Chicago, in the words of Studs himself, “has—as they used to whisper of the town’s fast woman—a reputation.”

Chicago was of course also home to the Pulitzer Prize–winning oral historian Studs Terkel, who moved there in 1922 at age ten and made it his home until his death in 2008 at the age of ninety-six. Illustrated throughout with black-and-white photographs that perfectly capture Chicago’s unique beauty, here is a splendid evocation of Studs’s hometown in all of its glory and imperfection.

News and Reviews

In March 1970, Maya Angelou sat down with Studs Terkel for a radio interview about her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Books by Studs Terkel

Will the Circle Be Unbroken?
Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith

Studs Terkel

Hard Times
An Illustrated Oral History of the Great Depression

Studs Terkel

Race
How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession

Studs Terkel

Division Street
America

Studs Terkel

Goodreads Reviews