Working Papers: On the Job with Studs Terkel

Abstract

Most English teachers do not read much. My wife, who is a novelist, discussed this dark secret recently when she was invited to speak to a group of my colleagues about contemporary literature. Many of the writers and works she alluded to drew more blanks than they might have at a similar conference of arbitrageurs or traffic control managers. She has seen me at my desk, virtually mulched from the sunlight by piles of ungraded papers, so she knows what we're up against, but the question remains: Who is reading, if not the transmitters of literature to the next generation? Why, then, in this tight reading economy, do I devote such disproportionate time to reading books of interviews? (Mind you, nothing supplants fiction for me, but interviews run a respectable, if distant, second.) One of my earliest forays into this genre came with my discovery of the Paris Review's Writers at Work series, a wonderfully rich exploration of writers' work styles and philosophies that by now has stretched over several decades and many volumes. Reading these volumes even inspired me to conduct a series of similar interviews about work styles with a group of prominent scientists.