Something to readWhat's next
Working
A book of more than a hundred Americans describing their jobs and how they feel about them
Why it’s worth your time
In Working, Studs Terkel lets people from every corner of American work describe their jobs in their own voices, and reading them can widen your sense of how work feels to the people around you. A stranger's account of a job you've never thought about can sharpen how you see your own.
What other people's jobs feel like from the inside
The book · About 12 hours of reading · Buy or borrow
How to get it
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- Read one interview at a time.
Start anywhere. Notice where Terkel places contrasting voices from the same line of work next to each other, and listen for what each person says about pride, boredom and whether their work matters.
- Write your own interview.
On one page, answer two questions as plainly as Terkel's speakers do: what do you do all day, and how do you feel about it? Keep to what's true this month, dull parts included.
Good moments for this: on a slow Sundaywhen your job feels hard to explainbefore you manage people whose work you've never done
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
Some of the jobs have changed or vanished since. What people say about pride and monotony tends to carry across the decades better than the job details.
What might make this harder
Read five interviews from jobs you know nothing about and stop there. The book does its work without being finished.
Questions people ask
What is Working by Studs Terkel about?
An oral history first published in 1974, built from more than a hundred interviews with American workers, from gravediggers and spot-welders to studio heads and executives, each talking about what their job is like and what it means to them.
Is Working by Studs Terkel still worth reading?
For how work feels, it can be; for what jobs pay or involve today, much less so, since it describes work as it was in 1974.
How do I find out what a job is really like?
Ask someone who does it to walk you through their last few working days, including the parts that never make it into a job posting.
What it says, and how it holds up
A lot of what we know about other people's jobs comes from titles, job ads and the occasional complaint. Studs Terkel, an author and radio broadcaster, took a different route: he interviewed more than a hundred working people and let them talk. As the publisher describes it, contrasting voices from the same industry sit side by side, so differences of class, power and identity show between the lines.
The themes the publisher names are pride and monotony, dignity and alienation, and whether what people do matters. The New Press, its publisher since 1997, credits Terkel's work with inspiring StoryCorps.
As an oral history, Working listens more than it advises. If what you want is a way to change how your own job feels, the idea of job crafting, which Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton set out in a 2001 paper, can pick up where the interviews stop: the changes people make themselves to their tasks, to their dealings with others at work, and to how they think about what the work is for.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.