radson

Read the STOP SMILING interview with Studs Terkel: BEHIND THE BILLBOARDS By Danny Postel and JC Gabel (This interview originally appeared in the STOP SMILING Chicago Issue) Studs Terkel is “as much a part of Chicago as the Sears Tower and Al Capone,” a BBC journalist once remarked. Indeed, just as tourists to the “city of the century” throng to the skyscraper's observation deck and make their way to one or another of the gangster's old haunts, many a writer has pilgrimaged to the Uptown home of Chicago's legendary oral historian, where the following interview took place. Stop Smiling: One of Chicago's literary giants passed away earlier this year. How well did you know Saul Bellow? Studs Terkel: I didn't know him too well. We disagreed on a number of things politically. In the protests in the beginning of Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, when Mailer, Robert Lowell and Paul Goodman were marching to protest the Vietnam War, Bellow was invited to a sort of counter-gathering. He said, “Of course I'll attend.” But he made a big thing of it. Instead of just saying OK, he was proud of it. So I wrote him a letter and he didn't like it. He wrote me a letter back. He called me a Stalinist. But otherwise, we were friendly... Read the STOP SMILING interview...

2023-02-05 11:30