Terkel, the master of oral history, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985 for chronicling World War II in The Good War. Born in New York to a tailor and a seamstress, Terkel, at the age of eight, moved with his family to Chicago, where he spent most of his life. In his teens, his parents ran a rooming house that was a collecting point for people of all types. Terkel credited his knowledge of the world to the tenants who gathered in the lobby of the hotel and the people who congregated in nearby Bughouse Square. He never tired of the stories of "ordinary" people and in his second book (and first book of oral history interviews), Division Street: America, a metaphorical title that derived from Chicago's true Division Street, Terkel captured 20th century urban life as told to him by those ordinary folks living in and around Chicago. Division Street set the pattern his subsequent books would follow and established Terkel's reputation as the world's foremost oral historian.