From these unique memories, shared experiences and patterns of thought emerge. This allows Terkel to explore important questions while at the same time presenting many different perspectives. No single interview occupies more than eight pages of text. While Terkel does not assign blame for this generational gap, he does suggest that older people have buried their memories of the Depression and have thus deprived their children of important truths about America’s worst economic collapse. Terkel uses these, along with more thoughtful answers from other young people of the 1960s, to illustrate The Generational Gap between parents who experienced the Depression and children who did not. The shortest interviews are only a few sentences long and are all from young people who are ignorant or indifferent about the Depression. For clarity’s sake, this guide applies numbers to chapters and sections. For instance, the first chapter of Book 1 is called “The March,” and the first of this chapter’s three sections has the title “Jim Sheridan,” a veteran of World War I who, in that section, shares his memories of the 1932 Bonus March on Washington, DC. Terkel groups interviews into chapters according to various unifying themes and then names individual sections for the interviewee(s) whose recollections appear there. Chapters and sections have titles but no numbers. The five books have numbers but no titles. Hard Times is divided into five “books,” each of which includes multiple chapters, and each chapter is subdivided into sections.

This guide refers to The New Press 1986 edition of Hard Times.Ĭontent Warning: The source material features frequent depictions of suicide, mental illness, and extreme stress. He later won a Pulitzer Prize for The Good War: An Oral History of World War II (1984). On the strength of this book, Terkel acquired a reputation for exemplary oral historical research. It also gave him substantial interviewing experience, which he showcases in Hard Times by pausing to ask questions but otherwise allowing interviewees to speak for themselves. This platform allowed him to speak with prominent figures on a regular basis. Their inclusion serves one of Terkel’s primary purposes, which is to bring authentic Depression-era experiences to a generation born and raised in affluence.įrom 1952 to 1997, Terkel hosted a weekday radio show in Chicago.

Hard Times also features comments from more than two dozen young people, all in their teens or twenties at the time of the interview, who did not live through the Depression.

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