Studs Terkel is a squat, 61-year-old man who has spent the past three years interviewing Americans about their jobs. He began in Chicago, where he is the host of a daily radio program. There he interviewed an aging waitress, a receptionist, a barber. In Indiana, he talked with a strip miner. In Kentucky, a farmer. In Lordstown, Ohio, a union leader at the General Motors assembly plant.

When he finished, Terkel had interviewed over 200 people (the transcripts filled more than 15,000 typed pages.) He cut this down to 134 interviews, most about five pages long, and organized them into a book.

The result is "Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do" (589 pp., $10), which Pantheon published this week. "Working" is Terkel's third book of interviews on a theme. His first, "Division Street: America" (1967) was, he says, "a report from an American village, Chicago," modeled after Jan Myrdal's "Report From a Chinese Village," which Pantheon published several years earlier. His second interview book, "Hard Times" (1970), was an oral history of the Depression.

Terkel was in Boston last week for the book author's obligatory plug-it and-run tour. Such promotional chores are part of his job, part of what he does all day now. But he would rather stay in Chicago, and he plans to cut the trip short, exercising a freedom of choice that the waitress, barber, and strip miner in his book (all pseudononymous characters) would probably envy.

Late last Friday afternoon, Terkel stretched majestically on his bed at the Copley Plaza. His hands were locked together behind his white hair to form a headrest; at the other end of his small body, his stocking feet were crossed. Terkel must have sensed the grandeur of the pose. "Do I look like one of those hoods?," he asked, thinking perhaps of some mafia chieftan.

No, he did not. He looked more scrappy than tough, more homely than slick--like the kind of man who would be named Studs. Terkel spoke energetically in a voice loaded with street flavor and professional resonance.

He began the interview by talking about the genesis of "Working," giving full credit for the idea behind the book to Andre Schiffrin, his editor.

Terkel: At the time Andre made that suggestion, we were just starting to question the quote-unqoute "work ethic" that Honest Dick talks about so much. There was that moment when we had that leisure after the Depression--post-World War II, in the sixties--when young people began to question, and say, "I want to do what I want to do, what I like to do." Well, that caught on in a way [laughs]--strangely enough. And so you got the young auto workers--young auto workers--absent on Mondays or Fridays: "Fuck it, doing all that stuff!" And of course, Lordstown is the great example. And the older guys, their fathers, the Depression people, said, "You got to," 'cause they never question. So they started thinking, as they're about to retire, "That's shit I've been doing all my life."

So this moment has come upon us. Now there's automation, we have the computer. This applies to white collar as well as blue, of course. The bank teller, she's wondering about her work: Is it that important? Remember the marvelous fireman at the end of the book, Tommy Patrick?

TOM PATRICK

(Excerpt from his interview in "Fathers and Sons," a chapter in "Working.")

"The fuckin' world's so fucked up, the country's fucked up. But the firemen, you actually see them produce. You see them put out a fire. You see them come out with babies in their hands. You see them give mouth-to-mouth when a guy's dying. You can't get around that shit. That's real. To me, that's what I want to be.

"I worked in a bank. You know, it's just paper. It's not real. Nine to five and it's shit. You're lookin' at numbers. But I can look back and say, 'I helped put out a fire. I helped save somebody.' It shows something I did on this earth."

Ah, that's the last line in the book, isn't it? There's something I did on this earth. That's why I'm here on this earth. Here to do what? To save lives. Save a baby, breathe life into a dying stranger, black or white.

Freud talked about the two prime impulses of man: Lieben and Arbeiten, Love and Work. Now you don't have many books about love. You have books about the technique of sex, the crap books. Technique--that's interesting. No feeling--the technique of sex. But even so, the pretense of books about sex. About work, nothing. And so, in a sense, Andre had a hunch. He just knew. It's hardly been written about. It seems to have caught, in that sense, something people have felt but haven't articulated.