“He didn’t even have a hotel reservation. “I picked Studs up at the Youngstown airport,” Bryner told me, recounting the time Terkel spent with him for the book. One of those people, Gary Bryner, is in the new exhibit, too. 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 Monday through Friday sort of dying.” It became a best-seller-and, a few years later, a musical-thanks, in large part, to the intimacy and depth Terkel elicited from people who are not usually the subject of books. “Working” featured interviews with more than a hundred workers from all walks of life. 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. Born in 1912, in the Bronx, Terkel moved with his family to Chicago in 1923 and never left. She was referring, of course, to Louis (Studs) Terkel, who died in 2008, at the age of ninety-six.

“This is a tribute to the legacy of Studs,” Jane Saks, who conceived of the exhibit, said. Large portraits of the subjects, taken by the photographer Lynsey Addario, were displayed in oversized wooden diptychs, accompanied by pamphlets that provided one-page bios of each worker. Twenty-four men and women were profiled for the exhibit, including a waitress, a police officer, a custodian, an escort, and a farmer. 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.

Studs terkel working interviews