'I'm glad the electricity works.' That's about it. What you have to find is your own niche that will allow you to keep feeding and clothing and sheltering yourself without getting downtown. [Laughs] Because that's death. That's really where death is." (Nora Watson, editor) Famous names Among the many who speak their minds about their work and their lives are baseball player Steve Hamilton ("To be perfectly honest with you, I'm ready to quit"), actor Rip Torn ("I don't have any contempt for people who do commercials") and football coach George Allen ("You have to put a priority on everything you do each day"). General themes As the foreword to the book points out, "Mr. Terkel found, work was a search, sometimes successful, sometimes not, 'for daily meaning as well as daily bread'.... The oral histories in Working are wistful dispatches from a distant era...when management practices and computers were just beginning to transform the American workplace. In the last thirty years, productivity has soared but job satisfaction has plummeted. It is hard to read Working without wondering what has gone wrong." Spinoffs and adaptations A bestseller when first published in 1974, the book also inspired the Broadway musical of the same title, and a similar book edited thirty years later by a team (mainly John Bowe, Marisa Bowe and Sabin Streeter), Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs. In May 2009 Harvey Pekar's graphic novel adaptation was released by The New Press, edited by Paul Buhle, with art by Sharon Rudahl, Terry LaBan, Gary Dumm, Peter Gullerud, Pablo G. Callejo, et al. References in popular culture In July 2009, The Second City ETC opened their 33rd revue, Studs Terkel's Not Working, honoring the writer in the year following his death. The revue, like Terkel's book, focused on the lives of ordinary people. Singer/songwriter James Taylor wrote a song called "Millworker" which was released on his 1979 album Flag. On his 2002 DVD Pull Over, Taylor explains that a story about a woman in a shoe manufacturing plant in Massachusetts, described in the book, inspired the song. In the television series The Facts of Life, Working is one of the books parents wanted to ban in the episode "Read No Evil". On Sept. 5, 2019, podcast The Radio Diaries, produced by Radiotopia on PRX, released an episode called "The Working Tapes of Studs Terkel." In it, Terkel's taped interviews with working