Nov. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Studs Terkel, who chronicled the travails and triumphs of America's working class as a radio-show host and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, has died. He was 96.

Terkel died yesterday at his home in Chicago, his son, Dan Terkel, said in an interview. ``He just went very quickly and was in no pain at all,'' Dan Terkel said. ``He lived a very long, full, satisfying though sometimes impetuous life.''

Born in New York, Terkel became synonymous with Chicago, the city where he moved at age 10 and rarely left. His parents ran a boarding house and a men's hotel during the Great Depression, giving the young Terkel a steady diet of the struggles of ordinary people whose stories became his life's work.

``People's everyday experience can be as profound and as compelling as any celebrity,'' said Russell Lewis, chief historian of the Chicago Historical Society, which houses many of Terkel's collected works. ``Everyday experience is powerful, and Studs understood this.''

Terkel's most popular books, ``Working,'' ``Hard Times,'' and ``The Good War,'' which earned him the Pulitzer Prize in 1985, were compilations of transcribed interviews with waitresses, truck drivers, gravediggers and prostitutes telling their own stories.

Unabashed Leftist

An unabashed leftist who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, Terkel considered President Franklin D. Roosevelt a hero and credited his New Deal programs for getting the U.S. economy moving again. Terkel, who always wore a red article of clothing as a symbol of his sympathies with labor, would later rail against welfare reform and other ``small government'' policies that he said hurt working Americans.

But his support of social programs was balanced by his suspicions that government abused its authority, and in 2006 he joined a suit seeking to block AT&T Inc. and other phone companies from giving customer records to the National Security Agency without a warrant.

Louis Terkel was born on May 16, 1912. His family moved to Chicago, where he fell in love with the city. He adopted the name Studs from a favorite book about Chicago, James T. Farrell's ``Studs Lonigan.''

His father, a tailor, and his mother, a seamstress, ran a boarding house and later a men's hotel called the Wells Grand in downtown Chicago. The hotel was a worker's hangout during the depths of the Depression, filled with bricklayers, painters and others who lost their jobs and who would gather to argue about the social issues of the day.

Argument

``The thing we miss today is argument,'' Terkel said in a speech at the University of California-Berkeley in 2003. ``We miss debate. We miss the whole idea of people going back and forth. I loved hearing those arguments.''

Terkel attended the University of Chicago where he graduated with a law degree in 1934. Deciding against practicing law, he found work the following year in the Federal Writers Project, a New Deal program aimed at supporting authors. He also became involved in the Chicago Repertory Theater.

A perforated ear drum prevented Terkel from enlisting in the military at the start of World War II, and he became convinced that his left-wing political views, which he wasn't shy about sharing, kept him from serving overseas as a member of the Red Cross during the conflict.

After the war, Terkel found work as a radio disc jockey and as a character actor on soap operas. This led, in 1949, to a starring role in one of the first television situation comedies, ``Studs' Place,'' where he played himself as a restaurant owner.

Blacklist

``Studs' Place'' went off in the early 1950s with the onset of the Cold War and the wide probe of Hollywood and the artistic community in the U.S., spearheaded by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Left-leaning media figures such as Terkel were considered subversive, and many lost their jobs. Actors including Burgess Meredith and Zero Mostel and writers such as Lillian Hellman and Clifford Odets were barred from working in Hollywood and elsewhere, some for a decade or more.

McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Terkel in 1953. When he refused to give evidence against other left-wing activists, he too was blacklisted.

``I have a big mouth, and I never met a petition I didn't like, so of course in the McCarthy days I got in trouble,'' Terkel said in the Chicago Historical Society interview.

Poll Tax, Lynchings

Terkel had signed petitions against the poll tax, which was designed to prevent blacks from voting in parts of the country, and against lynching. When the McCarthy investigation began, Terkel was encouraged to say he had been duped by communists into signing.

``I said, `Suppose communists come out against cancer,' do we have to automatically come out for cancer? I can't take back that I'm against the poll tax, that I'm against lynching, that I'm for peace,'' he told the historical society.

Terkel got back on his feet and on the air at Chicago's WFMT in 1958. He spent the next five decades playing jazz, classical and folk records, interviewing everybody who came to the city who interested him, including movie directors, musicians, politicians, philosophers and authors. His tape recorder became his signature.

In the 1960s, Terkel became interested in oral history and began interviewing hundreds of ordinary citizens about their lives. His first book, ``Division Street: America,'' was published in 1967 and contained interview with 70 Chicagoans. This was followed by ``Hard Times,'' a compilation of interviews about the Great Depression, and ``Working'' in 1974, his best known book, about people's working lives.

`Eight Men Out'

Terkel took a turn at acting in the 1988 John Sayles film ``Eight Men Out,'' a dramatization of the Black Sox scandal when players on the Chicago White Sox baseball team accepted bribes to lose the 1919 World Series championship to the Cincinnati Reds. Terkel played a newspaper reporter, trying to uncover the truth.

``Studs Terkel was the greatest proponent of oral history in the latter part of the 20th century,'' said Alan Stein, president of the Oral History Association and a lecturer at the California State University in Fresno.

Although he was sometimes criticized by academics for getting too close to a subject, Stein said, he helped bring oral history to the masses.

``What was groundbreaking was the combination of going out and getting these people to participate, getting these great stories and getting them published,'' the Chicago Historical Society's Lewis said.

Dreiser, Royko

``Studs Terkel was part of a great Chicago literary tradition that stretched from Theodore Dreiser to Richard Wright to Nelson Algren to Mike Royko,'' Chicago Mayor Richard Daley said in a statement. ``In his many books, Studs captured the eloquence of the common men and women whose hard work and strong values built the America we enjoy today.''

Terkel's books included ``American Dreams: Lost and Found,'' published in 1980, ``The Good War,'' in 1984, and ``Race'' in 1992. Terkel, an agnostic, also wrote ``Will the Circle Be Unbroken,'' about attitudes on religion and death, in 2001.

``I'm called an oral historian, which is something of a joke,'' said Terkel, who also wrote a jazz column in the Chicago Sun-Times. ``Oral history was here long before the pen, long before Gutenberg and the printing press. The difference is I have a tape recorder in my hand.''

His wife of 56 years, Ida, died in 1999. He is survived by a son, Dan.

To contact the reporter on this story: Cary O'Reilly in Washington at caryoreilly@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: November 1, 2008 00:01 EDT