Hard Times
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“Hard Times doesn’t ‘render’ the time of the Depression or historicize about it—it is that time, its lingo, mood, its tragic and hilarious stories.” —Arthur Miller
Hard Times captures the Great Depression not through the cold lens of statistics, but through the raw, unfiltered voices of those who actually lived it. Farmers who lost their land. Strikers who risked everything. Businessmen who watched fortunes evaporate overnight. Speakeasy operators. Sharecroppers. Ordinary Americans who refused to break.
First published in 1970, Studs Terkel’s landmark work weaves together hundreds of firsthand accounts to create something no history textbook can replicate: the texture of a decade. You hear the exhaustion in a laid-off worker’s words. The quiet dignity of a family making do with less. The spark of resistance that kept an entire generation moving forward.
Praised by the Saturday Review as “a huge anthem in praise of the American spirit,” Hard Times is as much about resilience as it is about ruin. Terkel gives equal weight to voices across the socioeconomic spectrum—from the powerful to the forgotten—painting a multidimensional portrait of America at its most vulnerable, and most tenacious.
Essential reading for history enthusiasts and anyone new to Terkel’s extraordinary body of work, Hard Times is a book that refuses to let the past go silent. At a time when the gap between the wealthy and the struggling has never been wider, Terkel’s voices from the 1930s feel less like history and more like a mirror. The faces change. The inequality doesn’t. Hard Times is not just a record of the past—it’s a call to see the present clearly, and to demand better.
Some stories need to be told in the voices of those who lived them. This is one of them.
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Studs Terkel (1912–2008) was an award-winning author and radio broadcaster. He is the author of Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession; Division Street: America; Coming of Age: Growing Up in the Twentieth Century; Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times; “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II; Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do; The Studs Terkel Reader: My American Century; American Dreams: Lost and Found; The Studs Terkel Interviews: Film and Theater; Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression; Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith; Giants of Jazz; Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Troubled Times; And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey; Touch and Go: A Memoir; P.S.: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening; and Studs Terkel’s Chicago, all published by The New Press. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of a Presidential National Humanities Medal, the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a George Polk Career Award, and the National Book Critics Circle 2003 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.
Alissa Quart is the executive director of The Economic Hardship Reporting Project, founded by Barbara Ehrenreich, and author of five acclaimed books of nonfiction. She lives with her family in Brooklyn.
