Last Wednesday, several hundred people gathered on the third floor of Chicago’s Harold Washington Public Library for the opening of “Working in America,” a multimedia exhibition exploring how Americans find meaning in work and define themselves through their jobs. Twenty-four men and women were profiled for the exhibit, including a waitress, a police officer, a custodian, an escort, and a farmer.
“This is a tribute to the legacy of Studs”
A master of oral history, Terkel published a number of as-told-to books, including, in 1974, “Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do,” the book that inspired the new exhibit. “Working” featured interviews with more than a hundred workers from all walks of life. The book, Terkel writes in the introduction, is about the search “for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life, rather than a