He wore a red-checked shirt and a pork pie hat and chomped on a fat cigar. Instantly recognisable as one of Chicago’s greatest literary characters, Studs Terkel was being hailed yesterday as a pioneering popular historian whose books and radio interviews spanned half a century of American life. He died on Friday aged 96.

Raised in Chicago by Polish immigrants, Terkel transformed a modest career as a radio announcer into a unique literary enterprise that produced a series of bestselling books about ordinary Americans and their experiences of the great events of the 20th century.

Terkel won the 1985 Pulitzer prize for The Good War, an oral history of the second world war. Critics acclaimed his rare ability to draw out mesmerising stories from the countless Americans he interviewed with the tape recorder he carried everywhere.

Blessed with a perfect radio voice that has variously been described as a “sweet growl” with “a tough-guy Chicago accent”, Terkel mostly steered clear of politicians and celebrities, aiming his microphone instead at a rich mix of farmers, workers, soldiers, housewives, bartenders and convicts.

Credited with establishing oral history as a serious genre, Terkel was a lifelong liberal whose heart lay firmly with the working class.

“Who built the pyramids?” he once asked. “It wasn’t the goddam pharaohs . . . it was the anonymous slaves.”

Terkel’s political sympathies almost killed his career during Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist crackdown of the 1950s. He was dumped from an early radio show when he refused to distance himself from liberal causes. But he quickly found another job with WFMT, the Chicago station that became his professional home for the next 45 years.

In the 1960s Terkel was commissioned to do a series of interviews about life in Chicago. The result was a book, Division Street, hailed by The New York Times as “a modern morality play, a drama with as many conflicts as life itself”.

Terkel went on to produce similar books about race and other divisions between the haves and have-nots in American life. In 1997 Bill Clinton, then the US president, awarded him a National Humanities Medal for his focus on the words of ordinary people. “Through their words he gives us a portrait of ourselves,” the citation said.

Terkel once said he preferred a gentle approach to his interview subjects and that his favourite question was: “What happened then?”

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