An indefatigable oral historian, Studs Terkel devoted himself to documenting the experiences and memories of his fellow Americans.

If his work was coloured by his commitment to the Left, his ability to talk to total strangers from all levels of society, and to extract their innermost feelings on sensitive subjects, produced a string of books which revealed the truth about America in a way that few writers have even attempted. He was de Tocqueville with a tape recorder.

Feisty and diminutive — he stood 5ft 5in tall and walked with a slouch which made him seem smaller — Terkel was a familiar figure on the streets of Chicago, where he spent almost his entire life. He remained active in old age, his death coming less than two weeks before publication of another volume of his memoirs, P. S.: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening.

Though he was forever associated with the daily life of the Windy City, he was born in the Bronx, New York. His real name, in fact, was Louis; he began calling himself “Studs” in his twenties after being captivated by James Farrell’s novels about the Chicago everyman Studs Lonigan. Terkel’s family moved to the Mid West after his father, a tailor, was stricken with a heart ailment. The boy grew up in a boarding-house run by his mother, a seamstress, and soon acquired a passion for listening to the stories and anecdotes of the guests who passed through the establishment.

Terkel received a law degree from Chicago University in 1934, but he later drifted into radio work with the New Deal organisation, the WPA Writers Project. (In later years he would recall that the WPA’s efforts to document oral history were an important influence on his own approach to journalism.) Before long he was making a living as an actor on radio soap operas. He began his own radio show in 1944, indulging his passion for conversation and music, particularly jazz, blues and gospel.

As the television era dawned, he graduated to a programme called Stud’s Place, which was acclaimed for its informal style (Terkel took on the role of a bar-owner chatting to celebrity guests). His stridently left-wing politics, however, attracted the attention of broadcasting regulators in the McCarthy era, and the programme was eventually taken off the air amid allegations that he was a communist fellow traveller. “I’m something of a loudmouth”, he confessed. “I was chairing rallies and signing petitions and some of them — a lot of them — were initiated by communists.

Terkel continued to work in radio nevertheless; his show on the WFMT station was to run for half a century. He also acted in various stage plays. His career as an author was slow to start: his first book, Giants of Jazz, did not appear until 1957, and it was a decade later that he published the first of his oral histories, Division Street: America, a “bottom-up history”, as Terkel put it, about the class structure of his adopted home city. With contributors ranging from landladies to racketeers and steelworkers, the book offered an alternative view of the American dream.

Although Terkel encouraged his contributors to speak for themselves, there was never any question as to his overall stance. As he later observed in the introduction to his hostile account of the Reagan era, The Great Divide: “I make no pretence of objectivity; there ain’t no such animal, though we play at the hunt.”

The worldwide success of Division Street: America encouraged him to embark on his next project, Hard Times: an Oral History of the Great Depression, published in 1970. Four years later came Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. Terkel’s sympathy for the underdog was much in evidence in both books. His detractors argued that he was content to view society through an agit-prop lens. A friend of the British reporter and columnist James Cameron, Terkel also lent his weight to the growing antiwar movement of the late Sixties and Seventies.

Terkel’s many taped interviews were eventually to form an immense archive. The BBC later broadcast extracts of his on-air work in the Radio 4 series, Old Stubborn Guts. Whether talking to celebrities or steel workers, Terkel displayed a rare empathy, even if he never quite seemed to master the switches on his tape-recorder: “It’s pretty exciting stuff, asking people, often for the first time, about their lives,” he once explained. “If I have any gift for it, one of the things in my favour is that I’m inept mechanically. The people I interview think I need them to help me work the machine. I can’t drive and I goof up with the tape-recorders. I’ve lost Martha Graham. I lost Michael Redgrave. I almost lost Bertrand Russell . . . I interviewed him in a village in North Wales during the Cuban missile crisis.”

After publishing a memoir, Talking to Myself, in the late Seventies, he went on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1985 for The Good War, a survey of the Second World War in which the contributors included his friend, Cameron. Racial prejudice, always a prominent theme in Terkel’s work, became the dominant subject in the 1992 study Race: How Blacks and Whites Feel About the American Obsession. Terkel struck a lighter note in the 1999 collection, The Spectator, a collection of interviews with figures from screen and stage. His radio career ended in 1997, Terkel signing off in his usual manner: “Take it easy, but take it.”

By this time he had become an elder statesman of the American Left, the anti-establishment magazine Mother Jones dubbing him “the national hell-raiser,” and reporters continued to beat a path to his door. Advanced deafness did not seem to diminish his appetite for storytelling. A biography by Tony Parker, a devout admirer of Terkel’s work, appeared in 1996. “Large portions of this book must, I know, read like an endless flow of hagiographic reminiscences,” Parker wrote. “I was unable to learn of anything at all that he’d ever said or done which had wounded or discomforted anyone.”

One of the few figures to break ranks, soon after the terrorist attacks of September 11, was Terkel’s old friend Christopher Hitchens. After Terkel chastised him for supporting the Bush Administration’s War on Terror, the two men exchanged hostile letters in the American Left’s house journal, The Nation. An exasperated Hitchens described Terkel as “an old fool in lots of ways”, quickly adding, “but he’s a noble old fool.”

In 2003 Terkel published Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times, which included interviews with another venerable sage, J. K. Galbraith, a pardoned Death Row inmate, and Paul Tibbets, the commander of the B29 aircraft which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. He contemplated his own mortality in Will the Circle Be Unbroken, a collection of “reflections on death and dignity” published in 2001. Having suffered the loss of his wife, Ida, in 1999 (and having survived a quintuple heart by-pass operation a few years earlier), he was intrigued by the idea of producing a book based on contemplation of the unknown. As he explained in his introduction, his previous work had drawn on experiences of past events: “But what about the one experience none of us has had, yet all of us will have: death? . . . What is there to remember of a time and place at which none of us has yet arrived?” Remarkably for a man of his age, Terkel underwent more major heart surgery in 2005, emerging with enough energy to compose a memoir entitled Touch and Go.

He and Ida had married in 1939. Their partnership lasted six decades. In his final years Terkel, an agnostic, expressed the wish that after his death their ashes should be mixed together and scattered around Bughouse Square, the Washington Square park which once served as the city’s equivalent of Speaker’s Corner. “It’s against the law,” he observed, mischievous to the last, “let ’em sue us.” He also jokingly devised his own epitaph: “Curiosity did not kill this cat.”

He is survived by his son, Dan.

Studs Terkel, author and broadcaster, was born on May 16, 1912. He died on October 31, 2008, aged 96