Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression

Studs Terkel (1912-2008) hosted a weekday radio program in Chicago from 1952 to 1997. Terkel also worked as an actor in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1967, he published his first book of oral histories, Division Street America, in which he explored the lives of inhabitants on a single street in Chicago. Hard Times was his second such collection. He later won a Pulitzer Prize for The Good War: An Oral History of World War II (1984).

Although Hard Times consists almost exclusively of other people’s recollections, Terkel nonetheless plays three important roles in the book. First, as interviewer, he poses occasional questions but otherwise allows his subjects to speak for themselves. Second, he includes an introductory “personal memoir” in which he relates his own Depression-era memories and thereby acts as an interviewee himself. Finally, he compiles and organizes more than 150 interviews in a way that allows for the development of unifying themes, revealing patterns of both thought and experience. Terkel’s approach enables him to create a panoramic view of the Depression in the USA, giving people from all walks of life the chance to testify, in their own words, about their experiences.