EDITING PROCEDURES IN STUDS TERKEL’S ORAL HISTORIES
EDITING PROCEDURES IN STUDS TERKEL’S ORAL HISTORIES

Summary/Abstract: The paper is concerned with the work of Studs Terkel (1912-2008), a Chicago-based radio interviewer and popular oral historian. During his long life, he personally interviewed thousands of people from all over the USA, and he published his interviews in the form of written narratives in his oral history books. The paper focuses on Terkel’s approach to editing the words of his interviewees and identifies four different editing procedures applied by Terkel. As illustrated on several examples from Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, these procedures significantly altered the form of the original utterances of the interviewees, which prompts the question of who the author of the texts really is.

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