Pulitzer Prize General Non Fiction Winner
The Good War
by Studs Terkel
Summary
An expansive oral history of the Second World War assembled from interviews with soldiers, war workers, nurses, journalists, and civilians on multiple continents. Terkel arranges these voices to complicate the sanitized memory of the conflict, surfacing themes of racism, profiteering, and trauma alongside heroism. The ironic quotation marks of the title signal his refusal to romanticize what most Americans came to call "the good war."
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Historical Context & Significance
Terkel was the master of the "portable tape recorder"; he used thousands of hours of interviews to strip away the myths of WWII and find the "human truth" behind the propaganda.