Unabashed leftist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Studs Terkel dies, aged 96.
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Saturday November 01, 2008 15:36
by Sandra F. - Socialist Party
'Curiosity did not kill this cat.'"
"Unabashed leftist", Studs Terkel who was blacklisted during the McCarthy has died. Born in 1912 to Russian Jewish parents, he got the nickname Studs as a young man from the character Studs Lonigan, the protagonist of James T Farrell's trilogy of novels about an Irish-American youth from Chicago's south side ... 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" http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2008/1101/...3.htm
"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 ... he earned his fame with Division Street: America, compiled from interviews with Chicagoans from all walks of life. Using their own words, it told the stories, of businessmen, prostitutes and ordinary working people.
In his own words; "We're born eventually to die, of course. But what happens between the time we're born and we die? We're born to live. One is a realist if one hopes."
Speaking to a reporter last year, Terkel said "My epitaph? My epitaph will be 'Curiosity did not kill this cat.'"