The Week In Books: Class acts who heard the voices of history

How sad that Studs Terkel, that peerless explorer of modern America's soul whose life almost matched the length of the century he charted, should leave us – aged 96 – on the brink of such a momentous week. The quick-witted, large-hearted Chicago radio host and interviewer wrote books – from Division Street:America through Hard Times, Working, The Good War and Coming of Age – that amount to the unofficial history of a nation buffeted by the winds of endless change. I say "wrote" rather than compiled, because some critics still find it hard to grasp the depth of artistry and expertise that gripping oral history needs. An author who kept faith with his subjects as he crafted volume after volume of page-turning testimony had a gift perhaps even rarer than those of great novelists or poets.

His peculiar art, the finely-shaped and finely-paced book of interviews, belonged to the times that formed him – even though it took decades before his patchworks of voices found a niche within hard covers. The 1930s and 1940s saw a flowering of documentary forms. From the prose of Steinbeck and Dos Passos to the photography of Walker Evans and the murals of Diego Rivera, the era's cutting-edge creators often braided closely-observed fragments of social reality into collages that revealed a deeper truth. Terkel reads like the last master of a New Deal aesthetic of documentary montage. He did so much more than work a tape-recorder.

Across the Atlantic, Terkel had one – almost equally talented – disciple. During the 1970s and 1980s, Tony Parker published a revealing series of interview-based books that opened the raw wounds of British society. Works such as The People of Providence (a housing estate), Soldier, Soldier (on the army) or Life after Life (about convicted murderers) gave space and weight to the sort of marginal or maverick people who generally find their stories told – with scorn or outrage – by outsiders. Fittingly, Parker ended his career with an oral biography of his friend Studs.

Where are their successors? Bogged down in the trenches. Since Max Arthur descended into the Imperial War Museum archives and emerged in 2002 with the bestselling treasure of Forgotten Voices of the Great War, oral chronicles of military or home-front experience in two world wars have more or less cornered the UK market in books about non-celebrity lives. For the First World War, only a tiny handful of survivors remain, but the "voices" brigade marches on thanks to the diaries and letters held in county record offices or regimental museums all over Britain. The latest recruit is Richard van Emden's The Soldier's War (Bloomsbury, £20), which enriches the familiar – and moving – mix with photos taken by Western Front combatants themselves on little pocket Kodaks.

Yet it says something far from flattering about contemporary Britain – or at least its publishers – that the words of peacetime civilians today no longer find a literary echo. The reasons for this silence include an aspirational culture that writes off the stoic routines captured by Terkel or Parker as abject failure, and the media denigration of working-class life as a dysfunctional soap-opera. In universities, oral history does continue to thrive in odd under-funded corners. In Britain, it owes a vast debt to the "History Workshop" movement led by the champion of interview-led grassroots research, Raphael Samuel. One of the students Samuel inspired at Ruskin College, Oxford wrote a homage after his death.

It paid glowing tribute to the "genuine love for people" of a historian who "spoke for the heart and the soul of the labour movement, real people, real workers". So maybe the spirit of Terkel, Parker and Samuel does still quicken here. It certainly endures in the imagination of the Ruskin graduate who wrote that obituary, and who now travels around Britain asking ordinary folk to tell him the story of their class-damaged lives: John Prescott.

P.S.Is this the sort of endorsement that Britain's best-loved American expat author really needs? A New York Times reporter who witnessed frenetic scenes aboard the John McCain battle bus last weekend heard the doomed Senator joke with an associate "about a book he was reading, A Walk in the Woods, a comic account of an out-of-shape writer's 2,100-mile hike of the Appalachian Trail". That unnamed source of last-gasp Republican mirth has armies of fans in rather less precarious occupations, as the paperback of Bill Bryson's latest volume – Shakespeare: the world as a stage – rides high in the charts. Still, his popularity in the McCain camp might mean that Bryson (left) knows exactly where to look when he wants a new sidekick and fall-guy to act as the hapless butt of gags during another American trek: A Walk into the Wilderness, perhaps?