ABSTRACT
Hard Times is a massive compilation of more than 150 self-portraits of American lives-culled from hundreds more-centred on the experience of the 1930s. The interviews were conducted, edited, and arranged by Studs Terkel, the remarkable Chicago radio personality whose special gift for getting all sorts of people to talk about themselves was so profoundly demonstrated in Division Street: America. The people of Hard Times range widely, from New Deal officials and famous businessmen and artists to anonymous farmers, workers, and plain people. Terkel also includes a number of interviews with young people who can, of course, only talk about the Depression in terms of what they have read or been told, and who therefore enable us to see the book’s topic in terms of received memory as well as given. To read through the enormous range of personality and experience presented in the book is to encounter, in a sort of multimedia exposure, the depth and drama of life in the Depression. As has virtually every other reader, I found it moving, poignant, intense, human, and instructive.
