Terry Gross

Fresh Air went national in 1987, and we're celebrating that 20th anniversary by revisiting some classic interviews. In this segment: Harmonica player Larry Adler performed with legendary entertainers including Fred Astaire, George Gershwin, and Jack Benny, but he was blacklisted amid the anti-communist fervor surrounding the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s. Adler moved to England not long after; he died in August 2001. Rebroadcast from June 19, 1987.

Fresh Air went national in 1987, and we're celebrating that 20th anniversary by revisiting some classic interviews. In this segment: Tom Wolfe's best-selling books include Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, The Right Stuff and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. He began his career as a journalist, writing for The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Esquire and New York magazine. Rebroadcast from Oct. 29, 1987.

Fresh Air went national in 1987, and we're celebrating that 20th anniversary by revisiting some classic interviews. First up: Jerry Seinfeld, who sat down with Terry Gross before Seinfeld made him a star.

That hit TV show, of course, catapulted the comedian to fame and won six Emmy Awards before ending its run in 1999. The 2002 documentary Comedian, which followed Seinfeld on a stand-up tour, is available now on DVD. Rebroadcast from Sept. 2, 1987.

As artistic director of the Encores series at New York's City Center, Jack Viertel is the go-to guy for one of New York's hottest musical-theater tickets. It's just the latest phase, though, in an impressive theatrical career.

Fresh Air went national in 1987, and we're celebrating that 20th anniversary by revisiting some classic interviews. In this segment: Jackie Mason.

Mason's comic roots are planted firmly in the Borscht Belt, but he's conquered everything from HBO to Broadway. His one-man show The World According to Me earned Mason a Tony Award, an Outer Critics Circle Award, an Ace Award, and an Emmy Award, and it toured the U.S. and Europe for two years.

In Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789-1989, historian Michael Beschloss takes a look at nine crucial moments when a president risked his political career for the good of the country, often by taking an unpopular or controversial stand.

Garry Shandling parodied TV talk shows on The Larry Sanders Show, which ran on HBO from 1992 to 1998 and is now out in a four-DVD box set. It's called Not Just the Best of "The Larry Sanders Show" — in part because it features eight hours of extras, including essentially unedited conversations with stars who made guest appearances on the Larry Sanders sofa.

In 1961, an integrated group of self-proclaimed "Freedom Riders" challenged segregation by riding together on segregated buses through the Deep South. They demanded unrestricted access to the buses — as well as to terminal restaurants and waiting rooms — but pledged nonviolence.

British writer Jon Savage wrote England's Dreaming, a landmark book on the punk era. Now, in Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture, he's chronicled what he calls the "prehistory of the teenager."

Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, has written a new novel that Publishers Weekly describes as a "murder-mystery speculative-history Jewish-identity noir chess thriller."

The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a private-eye novel that takes place in a fictional community of Jewish exiles — "the frozen chosen" — displaced to a temporary settlement in Alaska by World War II.