Episode 2

For 45 years, Studs hosted a radio show on Chicago's WFMT, interviewing all the key figures in cultural life in the latter half of the 20th Century. His passion for music, theatre and literature was matched only by his engagement with politics and the social upheavals of the era, particularly civil rights. Black-listed for his association with Martin Luther King, he was an early champion of artists such as Mahalia Jackson, Maya Angelou and a young Bob Dylan and of ‘under-dogs’ and outsiders, ranging from Muhammad Ali to Woody Allen to Simone De Beauvoir.

But Studs Terkel was more than a celebrated chronicler of American life – in books of oral history about music, the world of work, race relations and the American Dream. As is revealed through extracts from his archive and from interviews recorded by Alan Hall in the years before his death in 2008, Studs came to embody the liberal conscience of America, extolling a world view that feels strikingly relevant in the era of President Trump.

Episode Two includes interviews with writers and musicians among them, Erica Jong, Jonathan Miller, Tennessee Williams and James Baldwin.

(Photo: Studs Terkel, Credit: Falling Tree Productions)