From the Archive

"I am an American, Chicago born," Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March famously begins. Watch Bellow discuss winning the Nobel Prize and the sudden overwhelming media attention it brought in a segment from a 1977 WTTW show.

Revisit an archival interview from 1977 with Joan Didion, the admired writer and dissecter of America who recently died at the age of 87.

Harold Washington was a frequent guest on WTTW over the course of his political career. Hear him discuss his upbringing, his coalitional politics, the Council Wars when he was mayor of Chicago, and more in archival interviews ranging from 1968 through 1984.

"It's never been the Black artist's problem, it has been other people's problem," the legendary Leontyne Price told WTTW in 1981 about the lack of Black artists, specifically in opera. "It's so simplistic, it's fairly ridiculous." Watch excerpts of the archival interview. 

New Yorker writer Jane Kramer discusses the myth of the American West, the rise of big agribusiness and its effect on both traditional ranching and cows, and what bringing her daughter along on her reporting could do, in this 1978 interview from the WTTW archives. 

Watch Sammy Davis, Jr. on the pioneering show "Our People," the first televised weekly forum for black issues, discuss the ongoing empowerment of African Americans in 1968. "Don't let 'em pigeonhole me, man, cuz I will not allow myself as a black individual to be pigeonholed," he says.

The Chicagoland-based Ferrara Candy Company has announced that it's moving into the Old Post Office downtown. Take a tour of their factory, where even the air tastes sweet, in a segment from a 2004 episode of Chicago Tonight.

The author of Roots and The Autobiography of Malcolm X explains the origins of Roots and his difficulty in capturing the experience of being on a slave-ship in a 1976 interview. "The absence of pride changes to a presence of pride" when you know your history, he says.

Lederman, who won a Nobel Prize in 1988 for demonstrating that there are at least two kinds of particles called neutrinos, coined the Higgs boson's nickname "the God particle," and worked at Fermilab outside Chicago as well as the University of Chicago, has died at age 96.

One hundred and three years ago, on July 24, 1915, more than 800 people lost their lives in Chicago's deadliest tragedy, when a top-heavy boat rolled onto its side in the Chicago River only twenty feet from the shore. Watch an archival Chicago Stories episode about the Eastland Disaster.

"Nobody needs a book much, do they?" It's a surprising sentiment to hear coming from a writer, but in this 1981 interview with WTTW's John Callaway, John Updike discusses his impressively humble views on literature, his existential anxieties, and his goals as a writer.