This is Planet Money from NPR.

Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Jacob Goldstein.

Work is sort of the center of the Planet Money universe.

You know, it's where all these big ideas about money and the economy collide with the real everyday lives of billions of people.

And when we heard this podcast about work that our friends at the show Radio Diaries did,

we knew it would make a fantastic episode of Planet Money.

By the way, there is one curse word in the show. Here it is.

The nature of the work you do, we just a book about work, jobs people do.

How would you describe your work? Let's say how would I describe my work?

In 1974, Studs Turkle published a book with an unwieldy title,

Working. People talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do.

It was a collective portrait of America and was based on more than a hundred interviews Studs did around the country.

And after working came out, something surprising happened.

It became a bestseller. It even inspired a Broadway musical.

Something about ordinary people talking about their daily lives and their own words struck a chord.

It certainly did that for me.

This is the sound of my copy of working in high school.

But it's one thing to read the interviews in the book and it's another thing to hear them.

And very few people have.

Studs recorded all the interviews on his portable, real-to-real tape recorder.

But after the book was released in 1974, he packed those raw interview tapes into boxes and stored them away.

And there they stayed, untouched until he died.

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