Showing posts with label journalist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label journalist. Show all posts

Monday, May 16, 2022

May 16: Louis "Studs" Terkel, American author

BORN MAY 16:

Louis "Studs" Terkel (1912-2008) was an American author and historian best known for oral histories of "everyday Americans." Born in NYC, at age 8 he moved with his family to Chicago, then America's "second city," with which he was ever after associated. Though he took a law degree at U of C, he went to work in radio, taking various jobs until he landed The Studs Terkel Program in 1952, which ran 45 years until 1997; on tis show he interviewed such diverse guests as Martin Luther King Jr., Leonard Bernstein, Bob Dylan, Dorothy Parker, Tennessee Williams, and Frank Zappa. In the meantime (late '40s and early '50s) he did the unscripted Studs' Place on TV, in which famous people and interesting characters passed through his greasy-spoon diner in Chicago. All this interviewing got him into the oral history racket, for which most of us outside of Chicago know him. In the '70s he wrote Hard Times, about the Great Depression, and Working, in which (per the subtitle) "People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do." In 1985 he won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for "The Good War": An Oral History of World War Two. The nickname "Studs," by the way, comes from the time he was reading James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy while acting in a play with another actor named "Louis."

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Saturday, April 16, 2022

Apr. 16: Anatole France, French "man of letters"

BORN APRIL 16:

Anatole France (born François-Anatole Thibault, 1844-1924) was a French poet, journalist, and novelist; he had several best-sellers, and was considered the "ideal French man of letters" in his day--indeed, the citation for his 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature mentioned that he had "a true Gallic temperament." He grew up in his father's bookstore, which specialized in the French Revolution. His many novels include Thaïs, about a legendary 4th-century female Egyptian saint; At the Sign of the Reine Pédauque, about the tribulations of a young man at the beginning of the 18th century; Penguin Island, a satirical fictional history, in which a nearly-blind missionary baptizes a bunch of birds and the Lord, to fix the problem, turns the birds into humans (they establish Penguinia, a country with a history which mirrors that of France); The Gods Are Athirst, about the rise and fall of a painter-turned-jurist in the dark years of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution; and The Revolt of the Angels, about the well-known story of the war in heaven between the angels led by the Archangel Michael and those led by Satan. He also wrote poetry, memoirs, plays, and literary and social criticism.

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Wednesday, April 6, 2022

Apr. 6: Lincoln Steffens, American investigative journalist

BORN APRIL 6:

Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936) was an American investigative journalist of the type called (proudly) "muckrakers." A series of his articles became The Shame of the Cities, about corruption in municipal government. He was born in San Francisco and raised in Sacramento; his family mansion became the California Governor's Mansion in 1903. The first quarter of his Autobiography, "Boy on Horseback," was published separately as a children's book in 1935, its lessons summed up in the observation that "the world was more interesting than I was."

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