In fact that quintessential American owed this turn in his career, at the age of 55, to the English actress Eleanor Bron while Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett proved as sage an inspiration to him as his friends Big Bill Broonzy and Mahalia Jackson.

Terkel, the last of three brothers, was born in 1912 in the Bronx, where his parents, Samuel and Anna, had arrived from the Polish/Russian border at the beginnng of last century.

A tailor and seamstress, each highly skilled, they were always at loggerheads she a volatile and abusive character, he beset by the poor health which left him all the more vulnerable to her vituperation. At his father's death, with business thin, the family was transplanted to Chicago, where Samuel's well-off brother-in-law installed Anna as manager at one of his rooming hotels, the Wells-Grand, whose lease she later took.

The place brought Terkel in contact with its diverse residents, including a hooker who plied her trade at premises elsewhere.

At McLaren High School Terkel relished debates and poetry, along with Paine, Voltaire and Upton Sinclair and found a particular penchant for Roget's Thesaurus.

Although he had not been especially aware of the Wall Street Crash, its effect began to be felt at the hotel, whose denizens now lingered over card games in the lobby before quietly vanishing.

Prospects did not look good for anything that might follow Terkel's stint at the city's university, to which he walked each day. Subsequent studies at law school were desultory, by which time this prospective attorney was known as Studs.

Mindful of his poor health, he wanted a more macho persona, and had adopted Studs, hero of James T.Farrell's Young Lonigan (1932).

By the time its sequels chronicled decline and suicide, Terkel was unshakeably Studs.

By 1934 he had a minor civil service post, but with the New Deal he joined the Federal Emergency Rehabilitation Administration to determine the nature of unemployment in large cities while hankering after some other job.

Later, Terkel joined a theatre group.

These dramatic forays led to appearances in radio soaps, when he was always cast as the villain. ''In all instances, I was disappeared,'' he said.

At the theatre, during an adaptation of Ethan Frome, he met a social worker, Ida Goldberg, a week older than him. At first she thought he looked like a hoodlum but soon found, as she always would, ''he amuses me'' even when, during their courtship, he was always borrowing money from her. In 1939, he claimed that marriage would cancel the debt, and thereafter she was wife and de facto manager.

Hopes of Red Cross work during World War II were foiled by Terkel's health, and he spent a year with the army as a radio newscaster.

Back in Chicago, Terkel was occupied with some more radio work, journalism and much public speaking.

Particular renown came with Stud's Place, a television program set in a restaurant where good talk was the main item on the menu.

It was struck off the menu in 1953, however, in the McCarthy era, when Terkel's activities were studied.

''I'd guess that half the organisations listed by Harry Truman's attorney general as subversive profited to the tune of a buck or two by my windiness,'' he said. Such had been the success of Stud's Place that visitors thought it existed, asking taxis to take them there.

Times now became hard, a little eased by Ida's taking up teaching.

Terkel read all the more.

This was to sustain the long-running radio show which began to air five days a week a few years later on the city's WMFT station. It became a regular halt for any visiting author. They could reckon on a host who, loathing the ''bite'' mentality, had closely read their book, its pages heavily underlined, and the conversation questions unscripted would form part of a program which flowed from classical to jazz and folk music.

With his cigar, hat and red muffler, he became a familiar city figure.

Undoubtedly a showman, Terkel was not a megalomaniac; far from villainous, he drew out his guests, who realised that listeners would not be content with public relations banalities.

Terkel idolised people such as James Cameron, Jacques Tati, Nelson Algren, Big Bill Broonzy and Bertrand Russell.

Of Broonzy he once said, ''No matter how humiliating the circumstances, he never allows himself to be humiliated'', while in Wales, where he lived, Russell told Terkel, ''An individual can do a very great deal simply by expressing an opinion. The powerlessness of the individual is a pretence, an alibi for doing nothing, a form of cowardice, almost.''

Such spirits guided Terkel, who nonetheless found it impossible to say ''I love you'' to his wife: a consequence, perhaps, of that fraught childhood which could have found a place in the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett. Curiously overlooked by her biographer, Hilary Spurling, is one of her most memorable conversations. As Terkel said on meeting the novelist at her South Kensington flat, ''Hers is not an accusatory tone. It never is. She simply wants to know. Her curiosity encompasses more than life. It's something else she seeks.'' It was a spirit he shared, and she summed up her work to him, ''I think actual life supplies characters much less than art. Life is too flat for that. You must make a clever person cleverer, a stupid person more stupid, and an amusing person more amusing ... Life is merely the mounting block. Don't you think so?''

That is a philosophy which could be considerably elaborated, and Terkel was spurred to do so by Eleanor Bron. When touring America with the revue The Establishment in the early 1960s, she appeared on his show. They got on well, and she later suggested to the publisher Andre Schiffrin, whom she had known at Cambridge, that Terkel should produce a volume of oral history along the lines of a recent success which his firm Pantheon had enjoyed with Jan Myrdal's Portrait of a Chinese Village.

William Benton, who bought Muzak for a song in the Depression and was a millionaire by 36, said, ''I have a tin ear. That's why my ear was so good for radio.'' In The Good War, a stockbroker uncorks his recollections. ''It's a terrible thing to say, but it was the most exciting span of time that I ever spent. The most romantic. If you're lucky enough not to get killed or maimed, and you go through it, it's much like a hospital experience. You never remember the pain, you remember the ass of the nurse who came in and bent over you.''

A defining moment in contemporary history for him was the 1965 Freedom Movement's march from Selma to Montgomery. Open a Terkel book and one reads on, such is the way he shows, as Russell said, how individual efforts make a difference.

When Working appeared, the writer and historian Nat Hentoff recalled, some schoolchildren in Pennsylvania were not allowed to read it after some parents objected to its being a coarse book; Terkel spoke there, and the book was reinstated.

Terkel relished life, and he initially deflected Gore Vidal's 1970 suggestion that he produce a volume on death. No sooner did he begin it Will The Circle Be Unbroken? (2001) than his wife died, in 1999.

Despite deafness he worked on, certain his doctor's ''ebullience, his spirit of bonhomie, and his skills have been key factors in my living far beyond my traditionally allotted span''. A contrast with a fireman in the book, who recalls that ''a friend of mine committed suicide by Blockbuster. His wife and his son died. He kept renting videos all day and all night and just drinking liquor, scotch. They found him with the VCR running.''

Terkel caught that great American way with words, and, after the subject of death, he turned to Hope Dies Last (2003), which was subtitled, with an echo of Russell's remark, Making a Difference in an Indifferent World. Inspired by Thomas Paine, it chronicles a new spirit.

Terkel had the spirit to be a part of every era through which he lived. Despite doubts about technology, he turned the tape recorder to brilliant effect. ''A decade that could throw up a phenomenon like the Beatles, that was really something, wasn't it?'' he said. His favourite song by them was Hello, Goodbye indeed, he was very much of the view ''you say goodbye, and I say hello''.

As he glossed it, ''... It expresses the inexpressible.'' Christopher Hawtree