Division Street.
Inscribed to Dorothy Day
[Day, Dorothy]. Terkel, Studs. Division Street: America. New York: Pantheon Books, (1967).
8vo.; red topstain; brown cloth; stamped in red, orange, silver; dust-jacket; light wear to top edge.
First edition; a second edition was published by the New Press in 1993. The dust-jacket prints reviews by Nadine Gordimer, Reuel Denney, Nelson Algren and Tom Wolfe on the lower cover; a synopsis of the book on the upper flap; and a biography of Terkel on the lower flap, along with a black and white photograph of him.
A presentation copy, inscribed: "For Dorothy Day – Whose vision and humanity and courage has help [sic] light our way. With deepest admiration, Studs Terkel/ 10/19/68." With two references in ink on the rear pastedown.
Day was a reformed atheist who went on to found the Catholic Worker. In December, 1929 – after a decade of writing for progressive Socialist newspapers, including The Masses, The Liberator, and The Call – Day converted to Catholicism and devoted her life to God. The Catholic Worker was first published in May, 1933; its mission was to support “God-given dignity” through a communitarian vision of society. Day and her collaborator, Peter Maurin, believed that by living in voluntary poverty amid the poor, they would help to improve their lot. According to the Catholic Worker website, “over 185 Catholic Worker communities remain committed to nonviolence, voluntary poverty, prayer, and hospitality for the homeless, exiled, hungry, and foresaken. Catholic Workers continue to protest injustice, war, racism, and violence of all forms.”
Division Street: America is Terkel’s first foray into recording oral histories. “No one has ever attempted to see what Americans think and feel about their own lives and the way their country has changed in recent years. [Division Street] is a remarkable self-portrait from the most unexpected and most obvious of sources: the Americans” (dust-jacket). Terkel interviewed seventy people in Chicago, arranging the interviews in the book according to the interviewee’s similarities. There are parts devoted to “Homeowners,” “Homemakers,” “Celebrity,” “Retired,” and “The Inheritors,” among others. In the section titled “Nostos” (which, on page 93, is translated as “the feeling you have when you return to your country”), there is an interview with “Sister Evelyn,” age 26. Sister Evelyn lived with two other nuns on the North Side, a neighborhood in which there was a growing Appalachian population; she was devoted to serving this community. On pages 113-119, Day has left underlining and marginal notations to a portion of Terkel’s interview with Sister Evelyn. One quote in particular that Day bracketed nicely dovetails with her own experience: “As Sisters, we became involved in the notion of a new Church: a certain willingness to question given structures; a certain uneasiness with industrialized answers; a certain acceptance of the ambiguity of not having answers; and the necessity of making a concrete choice” (p. 113).
Terkel was born in New York in 1912. He began his career as a stage actor and a radio personality. In the 1950’s, after being blacklisted due to his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he left the stage and started writing (he says he was not a Communist, simply a member of a left-wing theatre group). He is the author of 18 books, including: Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970); The Great Divide: Thoughts on the American Dream (1988); and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Good War: An Oral History of World War II (1984). He is also the author of the play Amazing Grace (1967), and a National Book Award nominee (1975).
http://www.catholicworker.org/
Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2006. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2006. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC
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