A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor

Bob Edwards

Bob Edwards first went on the air as National Public Radio's first newscaster in 1974, and in 1979 helped launch Morning Edition, which became the most listened-to program in public radio. Edwards hosted the show for twenty-five years, conducting over 20,000 interviews and winning numerous awards, including an Edward R. Murrow Award and a George Foster Peabody Award. Edwards is currently a senior correspondent for NPR news.

Meryl Streep

Growing up in New Jersey, Meryl Streep wanted to be an opera singer. But while a student at Vassar, she became interested in acting and after graduation she enrolled in the Yale School of Drama. She made her first feature film appearance in "Julia" (1977), and the next year she was nominated for her first Oscar for her role in "The Deer Hunter" (1978). In all, she has been nominated for the Academy Award 13 times, and has won it twice: for "Kramer vs. Kramer" (1979) and "Sophie's Choice" (1982). She has given outstanding performances in many other notable films, including "The French Lieutenant's Woman," "Silkwood," "Out of Africa," "Heartburn," "Ironweed," "Postcards from the Edge," "Dancing at Lughnasa," "Music of the Heart," "The Hours" and "Adaptation." On stage Streep has appeared in the Public Theater's production of "The Seagull" by Anton Chekhov, and later this summer, she will play the title role in the Public Theater's presentation of Bertolt Brecht's "Mother Courage and Her Children." In addition to her Academy Award honors, she has won several Emmy Awards (most recently for the HBO production of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America"), numerous People's Choice Awards, the Golden Globe, the New York Film Critics Circle Award, the National Society of Film Critics Award, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award, and a Life Achievement Award presented by the American Film Institute. In 2004, she joined The Culture Project as producer for the staging of Sarah Jones's one-woman show "Bridge and Tunnel." Streep plays one of the singing Johnson Sisters in the Robert Altman film "A Prairie Home Companion," and she recently finished production on the movie "The Devil Wears Prada," in which she plays a high-powered New York City fashion magazine editor. She will narrate a pair of children's classics—The Velveteen Rabbit and The Night Before Christmas—available soon at Starbucks, and later in general release by Random House Inc.'s Listening Library.

Studs Terkel

calls himself a "disc jockey," a reference to his role as host of the Peabody Award-winning talk show, The Studs Terkel Program, heard for 45 years in Chicago on WFMT. On New Year's Day, Terkel aired his last regularly scheduled radio show. He'll spend the next two years working on the Studs Terkel-WFMT Archive, which will become a Chicago Historical Society collection of 7,000 hours of interviews. Before starting with WFMT in 1953, Terkel had starred in Studs' Place, one of the programs that created the Chicago school of television. The show began airing in 1950, the year that Joseph McCarthy began claiming that he had a list of Communist Party members in the U.S. State Department. The popularity of Studs' Place couldn't keep it on the air: the program was dropped by NBC when Terkel wouldn't reverse his "pro-Communist" positions in favor of price and rent controls and against the poll tax and Jim Crow laws. By the mid-'60s, Terkel's interviews on WFMT began to be noticed outside of Chicago. In 1965, his first oral history was published, Division Street: America, about class differences in Chicago. Terkel calls his writing "bottom-up history ... [interviews with] ordinary people who have something real to say about themselves." To compile each of his books, Terkel meets with hundreds of these "ordinary people" and then sifts through the hours upon hours of resulting tape until the interviews are distilled down to bare truth. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1985 book The Good War, the story of World War II told through soldiers and civilians on both sides. A year ago this month, Terkel was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Terkel's latest book is My American Century (New Press), the best of his tapes/social chronicles. In November 1997, the National Book Foundation gave Terkel a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. The award is given to an individual who has enriched the nation's literary heritage through a lifetime of work.