A north-west chief reporter has published a new book featuring one of the final interviews with renowned oral historian Louis ‘Studs’ Terkel.

Peter Devine, of the Stockport Express, travelled to Chicago in 2005 as he was writing a travel piece about the American city.

He managed to secure the chat with Studs despite the fact he was recovering from a broken neck and had become entirely dependent on the help of others.

It is this interview that appears in Peter’s new book – The Final Interview: Studs Terkel – which will be on sale here and in America to coincide with the historian’s 97th birthday on 12 May.

Peter said: “I first became acquainted with Studs and his books on oral history while studying my American Studies degree at Manchester University in the mid-1990s.

“I decided I had best try to get an interview with him, although my chance didn’t come until 2005, while I was doing a travel piece on Chicago, where he lived, for the Stockport Express.

“I interviewed him at his home in Chicago in February 2005 and despite the fact that he was a 92-year-old getting over a broken neck, he was in his mind an 18-year-old going on 90 plus.

“He was fascinating, the way in which he brought the sum of his knowledge to the interview.

“I was there to ask him about his own mortality and some of his responses were surprising given he had been so independent up to the accident and now he was dependent on other people.

“That is why I called it his final interview because he knew his number was up and he was then living on borrowed time.”

Studs was born in 1912 in New York and moved to Chicago aged eight where his family ran a rooming house for lodgers.

One of his many books, The Good War, which involved ordinary Americans talking about their experiences, won him a Pulitzer Prize.

Studs, who died last October, also interviewed celebrities such as Bob Dylan, Tennessee Williams and Woody Allen.

Peter with Louis ‘Studs’ Terkel