In the summer of 1962, the Swedish writer Jan Myrdal spent a month in Liuling, China, talking to peasant farmers. Their testimonies were published in English by Pantheon, under the title Report from a Chinese Village. Pantheon’s managing director, André Schiffrin, saw the book as a natural complement to the works of E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and other “bottom-up” historians on his backlist. The same method, he realized, could be used to create “a collective portrait of everyday life” anywhere in the world, even Chicago.
It wasn’t so much the place that interested him as it was a particular resident. At the suggestion of an actress friend who had been a guest on The Studs Terkel Show, a long-running arts program on Chicago’s WFMT, Schiffrin read a few transcripts in the station’s magazine. Struck by the host’s “unique ability to listen to people,” he felt sure he’d found the right person to create an “American equivalent of Myrdal’s work.” Terkel, however, was apprehensive. “I thought he was crazy,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Are you out of your mind?’”
