Keillor, Garrison (1942—)

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Keillor, Garrison (1942—)

The humorist Garrison Keillor is best known as the host of A Prairie Home Companion (1974-1987; 1993—) and the American Radio Company (1989-1993), both of which have been carried nationally on public radio to up to five million weekly listeners. He has also published stories for the New Yorker and novels about radio and small town life in the Midwest. Keillor is the consummate storyteller, whose creation of the small town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average," has won him a large following of listeners and readers drawn to the nostalgic, down-home sentiment of his monologues and stories.

Born Gary Edward Keillor in Anoka, Minnesota, he grew up in rural Brooklyn Park, where he was a devoted listener of popular radio shows like Fibber McGee and Molly and Gangbusters. Because his fundamentalist parents banned television until Keillor was in high school, he tended to see television as sinful and radio as a magical doorway to another world far away from his hometown. In 1991, Keillor published WLT: A Radio Romance, a novel that recreates the golden days of radio and suggests the nostalgia Keillor feels for the medium. As he told Reed Bunzel, "There's no romance in television; it's just the Wal-Mart of the mind. Radio is infinitely sexier."

Keillor began in radio in 1963 at KUOM at the University of Minnesota, where he was an English major. Simultaneously, he was also honing his writing skills, wanting to follow in the footsteps of the legendary Mark Twain and his favorite writers at the New Yorker, E. B. White and James Thurber. He published his first story in the magazine in 1970. Ever since, he has had a dual career as a radio personality and a writer.

In the 1970s, Keillor created a popular morning show on St. Paul's public radio station which would eventually be called A Prairie Home Companion. The show combined many styles of music, humorous spots for made-up commercial sponsors—like Powdermilk Biscuits (which "help shy persons get up and do what needs to be done") and Jack's Auto Repair—and tall tales that bordered on burlesques of small town life. Over the years, Keillor would develop his style of storytelling to more closely resemble local-color realism told from the visitor's point of view. Opposed to the ironic distance maintained by contemporary stand-up comics, Keillor wanted the freedom to poke fun at the provincialism and Lutheran view of life that pervaded small towns in Minnesota, while also creating sympathy for his characters (many of them based on people he knew). The result—his nearly 30-minute-long monologues on the news from Lake Wobegon—has become the most admired aspect of his radio shows.

With the publication of his most popular novel, Lake Wobegon Days (1985), Keillor solidified the identity of the small Minnesotan town in the nation's imagination and established his own persona as the hometown boy who could never go home again. Two years later, he published Leaving Home: A Collection of Lake Wobegon Stories, and left St. Paul, where he had been producing A Prairie Home Companion, to move to Denmark with his new wife and devote himself to his writing. Within a few months he returned to settle in New York, where he fulfilled his long-time dream of being on staff at the New Yorker. But in 1989, Keillor returned to radio with his American Radio Company, which like A Prairie Home Companion, was a throwback. It drew many well known musical acts and tried to shed the small town image of its predecessor, becoming more of a glitzy big city program. Keillor's new persona was that of a Midwestern boy who was wide-eyed and lost amidst the wonders of New York, which had beckoned to him through his radio as a child. Within a few years, though, Keillor's radio company was forced to leave New York because of the exorbitant expense of producing its shows there.

In 1993, Keillor made the difficult return to Minnesota, where he resumed broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion, which combines many of the elements of his original show with those of his New York show. It continues to be a mainstay of public radio programming nationwide. Keillor and company take the show on the road and broadcast a portion of the season from New York, drawing large audiences wherever they go. The show still features its trademark news from Lake Wobegon and commercial sponsors, which include Bertha's Kitty Boutique and Bebop-a-rebop Rhubarb Pie ("Nothing takes the taste of humiliation out of your mouth like a piece of rhubarb pie"), as well as recurring spots like Guy Noir, reminiscent of old detective shows.

Keillor's career continues on its dual path. He published the novel Lake Wobegon Boy in 1997 to much acclaim and is writing a film script. Although National Public Radio had refused to distribute Keillor's radio program in the 1980s because it believed the show would have only regional appeal (causing Minnesota Public Radio to form its own distribution network), Keillor has proven that Americans from New York to California cannot get enough of the sentimental nostalgia and good-natured humor that pervade Keillor's stories about Lake Wobegon.

—Anne Boyd