CHICAGO — Author-radio host-actor-activist Louis “Studs” Terkel died Friday at his Chicago home at age 96.

At his bedside was a copy of his latest book, “P.S. Further Thoughts From a Lifetime of Listening,” scheduled for a November release.

Beset in recent years by a variety of ailments and the woes of age, which included being virtually deaf, Terkel’s health took a turn for the worse when he suffered a fall in his home two weeks ago.

It is hard to imagine a fuller life.

A television institution for years, a radio staple for decades, a literary lion since 1967, when he wrote his first best-selling book at the age of 55, Louis Terkel was born in New York City on May 16, 1912. “I came up the year the Titanic went down,” he would often say.

He moved with his family to Chicago when they purchased the Wells-Grand Hotel, a rooming house catering to a wide and colorful variety of people. He supplemented the life experiences there by visits to Bughouse Square, the park across the street from the Newberry Library that was at the time home to all manner of soapbox orators.

“I doubt whether I learned very much (at the park),” Terkel wrote. “One thing I know: I delighted in it. Perhaps none of it made any sense, save one kind: sense of life.”

Early career

He attended the University of Chicago, where he obtained a law degree and borrowed his nickname from the character in the “Studs Lonigan” trilogy by Chicago writer James Farrell. He never practiced law. Instead, he took a job in a federally sponsored statistical project with the Federal Emergency Rehabilitation Administration, one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies. Then he found a spot in a writers project with the Works Progress Administration, writing plays and developing his acting skills.

Terkel worked on radio soap operas, in stage plays, as a sportscaster and a disk jockey. His first radio program was called “The Wax Museum,” an eclectic gathering of whatever sort of music struck his fancy, including the first recordings of Mahalia Jackson, who would become a friend.

When television became a force in the American home in the early 1950s, Terkel created and hosted “Studs’ Place,” one of the major jewels in the legendary “Chicago school” of television that also spawned Dave Garroway and Kukla, Fran and Ollie.

It was on “Studs’ Place,” which was set in a tavern, that large numbers of people discovered what Terkel did best — talk and listen. Terkel, arms waving, words exploding in bursts, leaning close to his talking companions, didn’t merely conduct interviews. He engaged in conversations. He was interested in what he was talking about and who he was talking to.

But his TV career did not last. Terkel later complained that the commercialization of television forced his show, and the others in the “Chicago school,” from the air. Also, at that time, McCarthyism was a potent force, and Terkel was outspoken politically, with a highly liberal tone. “I was blacklisted because I took certain positions on things and never retracted,” Terkel once said in an interview about those times. “I signed many petitions that were for unfashionable causes and never retracted.”

He found a larger audience when he was hired at a new fine arts station, WFMT, where Terkel’s brand of chatter, jazz, folk music and good conversation was a perfect fit. His political views were more tolerated on the station, and Terkel began his morning radio show in 1952.

A new voice

In the mid-1960s, Terkel was in his mid-50s, a time when most people are beginning to plan the end of their careers. Terkel was about to start a new one.

A British actress he had interviewed was so impressed with his technique that she told a friend, Andre Schiffrin, a book publisher, about Terkel. Schiffrin remembered reading transcripts of some of Terkel’s radio interviews in a WFMT publication and had been impressed.

He contacted Terkel — who had written a little known book, “Giants of Jazz,” in 1957 — and, after much convincing argument, coaxed the radio personality into writing a book compiled from interviews with Chicagoans from all walks of life. “I told him he must be out of his mind,” Terkel recalled about his first confrontations with Schiffrin, but he relented.

The result was “Division Street: America,” published in 1967 to rave reviews and best-selling success. It told the stories, in their own words, of businessmen, prostitutes, Hispanics, blacks, ordinary working people who formed the unit of America and also the divisions in society, using Chicago’s Division Street as a prototype of America.

It was a theme that Terkel would explore again and again, in “Hard Times,” his Depression era memoir in 1970; in “Working,” his saga of the lives of ordinary working people in 1974; in “American Dreams; Lost and Found” in 1980; and “The Good War,” remembrances of World War II, published in 1985 and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Most of his books were written radio. Terkel asked questions and then listened. He drew out of people things they didn’t know they had in them.

“I think of myself as an old-time craftsman,” Terkel said. “I’ve been doing this five days a week, for more than 30 years. When I realize the work is slipping, I’ll quit. But I don’t think I’ve reached that point yet. I still have my enthusiasm. I still love what I do.”

He was indefatigable, juggling his daily radio shows and his frequent public appearances with a steady stream of books. (He also played newspaper reporter Hugh Fullerton in the 1988 John Sayles Film “Eight Men Out,” about the Black Sox scandal of 1919).

In 1992 came “Race: What Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession,” followed by 1995’s “Coming of Age, The Story of Our Century by Those Who’ve Lived It,” and 1997’s “My American Century.”