Author | Studs Terkel |
---|---|
Subject | Working class |
Publisher | Pantheon Books |
Publication date | 1974 |
331.20973 | |
LC Class | 331.20973 |
Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do is a 1974 nonfiction book by the oral historian and radio broadcaster Studs Terkel. [1]
Working investigates the meaning of work for different people under different circumstances, showing it can vary in importance. [2] The book also reflects Terkel's general idea that work can be difficult but still provides meaning for workers. It is an exploration of what makes work meaningful for people in all walks of life, from Lovin' Al the parking valet, Dolores the waitress, the fireman, to the business executive. The narrative moves through mundane details, emotional truths, and existential questioning.
Following a preface, a foreword, and an introduction, the volume is divided into nine "books," each of which contains one or more subsections that provide several accounts of working people's jobs and lives. These books tie their diverse content together with themes. These themes take the form of subtitles. Some books have only one theme (the theme of Book One is "Working the Land"); others have several.
Book One contains stories by three newspaper delivery boys, a farmer, a farm worker, a farm woman, a deep miner and his wife, a strip miner, and a heavy equipment operator. Here is a sample:
Book Two features narratives from a receptionist, a hotel switchboard operator, a telephone operator, a professor of communications, an airline stewardess, an airline reservationist, a model, an executive secretary, a sex worker, a writer/producer, a copy chief, two actors, a press agent, an installment dealer, and a telephone solicitor. Here is a sample:
Book Three has stories by a sanitation truck driver, a garbage man, a washroom attendant, a factory mechanic, a domestic worker, a janitor, a doorman, two policemen, an industrial investigator, a photographer, and a film critic. Here is a sample:
Book Four tells the stories of two spot-welders, a utility man, a stock chaser, a plant manager, a general foreman, a local union president, two cabdrivers, a bus driver, an interstate truckdriver, a car hiker, and a car salesman. Here is a sample:
Book Five narrates the tales of a barber, a hair stylist, a saleswoman, a dentist, a hotel clerk, a bar pianist, an elevator starter, an ex-salesman, a bank teller, an auditor, an organizer, an order filler in a shoe factory, a mail carrier, a gas meter reader, a supermarket box boy, a supermarket checker, a skycap, a felter in a luggage factory, a waitress, and two housewives. Here is a sample:
Book Six contains the stories of a bookbinder, a pharmacist, a piano tuner, a realty broker, a yacht broker, two stockbrokers, a project coordinator, a government relations coordinator, a process clerk, and an organizer. Here is a sample:
Book Seven's narratives involve those of a jockey, a baseball player, a sports press agent, a tennis player, a hockey player, a football coach, a radio executive, a factory owner, a bank audit department head, an ex-boss, the ex-boss' daughter, an ex-president of a conglomerate/consultant, "Ma and Pa Courage," and three retirees. Here is a sample:
Book Eight's stories are about a copy boy, a publisher, a proofreader, a department store manager, a jazz musician, an executive, the director of a bakery cooperative, a hospital aide, a baby nurse, a public school teacher, an alternative school teacher, an occupational therapist, a patient's representative, a practical nurse in an old people's home, a memorial counselor, and a grave digger. Here is a sample:
Book Nine recounts the narratives of a tree nursery attendant, a carpenter/poet, an editor, an industrial designer, a nun to naprapath, an ex-salesman/ farmer, a lawyer, a librarian, a stone cutter, a service station owner, the service station's son and partner, a steelworker, the steelworker's son (a priest), an adult education teacher, a freight elevator operator, a policeman, and a fireman. Here is a sample:
Among the many who speak their minds about their work and their lives are baseball player Steve Hamilton ("To be perfectly honest with you, I'm ready to quit"), actor Rip Torn ("I don't have any contempt for people who do commercials") and football coach George Allen ("You have to put a priority on everything you do each day").
As the foreword to the book points out, "Mr. Terkel found, work was a search, sometimes successful, sometimes not, 'for daily meaning as well as daily bread'.... The oral histories in Working are wistful dispatches from a distant era...when management practices and computers were just beginning to transform the American workplace. In the last thirty years, productivity has soared but job satisfaction has plummeted. It is hard to read Working without wondering what has gone wrong."
A bestseller when first published in 1974, the book also inspired the Broadway musical of the same title, and a similar book edited thirty years later by a team (mainly John Bowe, Marisa Bowe and Sabin Streeter), Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs.
In May 2009 Harvey Pekar's graphic novel adaptation was released by The New Press, edited by Paul Buhle, with art by Sharon Rudahl, Terry LaBan, Gary Dumm, Peter Gullerud, Pablo G. Callejo, et al.
In July 2009, The Second City ETC opened their 33rd revue, Studs Terkel's Not Working, honoring the writer in the year following his death. The revue, like Terkel's book, focused on the lives of ordinary people. [3]
Singer/songwriter James Taylor wrote a song called "Millworker" which was released on his 1979 album Flag . On his 2002 DVD Pull Over, Taylor explains that a story about a woman in a shoe manufacturing plant in Massachusetts, described in the book, inspired the song.
In the television series The Facts of Life , Working is one of the books parents wanted to ban in the episode "Read No Evil".
On Sept. 5, 2019, podcast The Radio Diaries, produced by Radiotopia on PRX, released an episode called "The Working Tapes of Studs Terkel." In it, Terkel's taped interviews with working people are played and examined. [4]
The Grapes of Wrath is an American realist novel written by John Steinbeck and published in 1939. The book won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it was cited prominently when Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962.
Michael Royko Jr. was an American newspaper columnist from Chicago. Over his 30-year career, he wrote over 7,500 daily columns for the Chicago Daily News, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Chicago Tribune. A humorist who focused on life in Chicago, he was the winner of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
Louis "Studs" Terkel was an American writer, historian, actor, and broadcaster. He received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1985 for The Good War and is best remembered for his oral histories of common Americans, and for hosting a long-running radio show in Chicago.
The Federal Writers' Project (FWP) was a federal government project in the United States created to provide jobs for out-of-work writers during the Great Depression. It was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal program. It was one of a group of New Deal arts programs known collectively as Federal Project Number One or Federal One. The FWP employed thousands of people and produced hundreds of publications, including state guides, city guides, local histories, oral histories, ethnographies, and children's books. In addition to writers, the project provided jobs to unemployed librarians, clerks, researchers, editors, and historians.
Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche is a book by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami about the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. The book is made up of a series of interviews with individuals who were affected by the attacks, and the English translation also includes interviews with members of Aum, the religious cult responsible for the attacks. Murakami hoped that through these interviews, he could capture a side of the attacks which the sensationalist Japanese media had ignored—the way it had affected average citizens. The interviews were conducted over nearly a year, starting in January 1996 and ending in December of that same year.
Arlie Russell Hochschild is an American professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and writer. Hochschild has long focused on the human emotions that underlie moral beliefs, practices, and social life generally. She is the author of nine books including, most recently Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, a finalist for the National Book Award. In The Second Shift, The Managed Heart, The Time Bind, and many of her other books, she continues the tradition of C. Wright Mills by drawing links between private troubles and public issues.
Pantheon Books is an American book publishing imprint with editorial independence. It is part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
James Thomas Farrell was an American novelist, short-story writer and poet.
John Beecher was an activist poet, writer, and journalist who wrote about the Southern United States during the Great Depression and the American Civil Rights Movement. Beecher was active in the American labor and civil rights movements. During the McCarthy era, Beecher lost his teaching job for refusing to sign a state loyalty oath. Following a 1967 decision of the California Supreme Court that disallowed such a loyalty oath, he was reinstated in 1977. Beecher's books include Report to the Stockholders, To Live and Die in Dixie, and In Egypt Land.
Claiborne Paul Ellis was an American segregationist turned civil rights activist and trade union organizer. Ellis was at one time Exalted Cyclops, local leader, of a Ku Klux Klan group in Durham, North Carolina, the city where he was born.
Working is a musical with a book by Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso, music by Schwartz, Craig Carnelia, Micki Grant, Mary Rodgers, and James Taylor, and lyrics by Schwartz, Carnelia, Grant, Taylor, and Susan Birkenhead.
Working may refer to:
Fred James Cook was an American investigative journalist, author and historian who has also been published extensively in The Nation, the Asbury Park Press andThe New York Times. He was written from a contemporary perspective about the Hindenburg disaster, Alger Hiss, the FBI, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Barry Goldwater, the Watergate scandal, the Mafia, the Ku Kux Klan, political bosses and healthcare in the United States. He has also written about historic events such as the American Revolutionary War, P.T. Barnum, the Pinkertons and Theodore Roosevelt.
John Leonard was an American literary, television, film, and cultural critic.
John Bowe is an American author and speech expert. He has written for The New York Times Magazine,The New Yorker, GQ, The Nation, McSweeney's, and This American Life. His work has been featured and reviewed in the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, and he has appeared on CNN, The Daily Show, with Jon Stewart, the BBC, and many others. He is the co-editor of GIG: Americans Talk About Their Jobs ; author of Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy, editor of US: Americans Talk About Love, and author of I Have Something to Say: Mastering the Art of Public Speaking in an Age of Disconnection. He co-wrote the screenplay for the film Basquiat with Julian Schnabel.
Claude Clossey Williams (1895–1979) was a Presbyterian minister active for more than 50 years in civil rights, race relations, and labor advocacy. He worked with the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, founded the People's Institute for Applied Religion, and served as the national vice president of the American Federation of Teachers. He was also the director of Commonwealth College in Mena, Arkansas, from 1937–1939.
What Work Is is a collection of poetry by Philip Levine. The collection has many themes that are representative of Levine's writing including physical labor, class identity, family relationships and personal loss. Its primary focus on work and the working class led to it being studied with emphasis on Marxist literary criticism. The focus on work is expressed in thematically different ways throughout the collection. Furthermore, much of the collection was shaped by concerns for blue collar workers as well as nationwide political events.
Charles Vernon Hamilton is a political scientist, civil rights leader, and the W. S. Sayre Professor Emeritus of Government and Political Science at Columbia University.
Jessie Lopez De La Cruz was a Chicano American farm worker, the first female recruiter for the UFW, an organizer and participant in UFW strikes, a community organizer, a working mother, and a delegate to the 1972 Democratic National Convention. She ran the first UFW Hiring Hall, was an adviser to the California Commission on the Status of Women, and the secretary treasurer of National Land for People. Lopez-De La Cruz is also known for her work banning the short-handled hoe, her work educating fellow farm workers, her work promoting co-op farming, and her commitment to fighting injustice for the working poor.
Wallace Rasmussen was an American businessman and prominent philanthropist. Hired at Beatrice Foods Company in 1934 as an ice hauler, Rasmussen served as president and then chairman and chief executive officer of the former international food conglomerate, Beatrice, from 1976 until his retirement in 1980. Rasmussen rose to the top of the business with just a high school diploma.