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Garrison Keillor (born August 7, 1942) is an American author, humorist, musician, and radio personality.
He is best known as the founder and host of the Minnesota Public Radio show A Prairie Home Companion (also known as Garrison Keillor's Radio Show on BBC 7 and in Ireland). Keillor's trademark storyline is the weekly News from Lake Wobegon, a monologue about a fictional town (based on Freeport, Minnesota), "where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average."
Keillor's work includes:
- Home Grown Democrat (2003, ISBN 0670033650)
- Love Me (2003, ISBN 0670032468)
- Good Poems (2002, ISBN 0670031267)
- Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 (2001, ISBN 0571210147)
- Wobegon Boy (1997 ISBN 0670878073)
- The Book of Guys (1993, ISBN 067084943X)
- , (1991, ISBN 0670818577)
- We Are Still Married (1989, ISBN 0670826472)
- Leaving Home (1987, ISBN 067081976X)
- Lake Wobegon Days (1985, ISBN 0140131612); a recorded version of this won a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word or Non-musical Album in 1988
Keillor has also written several articles for The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. Keillor is the host of The Writer's Almanac, a five-minute program which is broadcast daily on some public radio stations in the United States.
Mr. Keillor's works from The New Yorker and other magazines have been gathered into two collections : Happy to Be Here, published in 1981 (and later acquired, and republished with 5 additional pieces, by UK outlet Penguin Books) and the aforementioned We are Still Married, which features newer articles, literary outtakes, poems and additional Lake Wobegon tales which were all written by him in the 1980's.
Mr. Blue
He also authored an advice column on Salon.com, titled "Mr. Blue". Following a heart operation, he resigned on September 4, 2001 in an article entitled "Every dog has his day" (http://www.salon.com/books/col/keil/2001/09/04/adieu/index.html):
- Illness offers the chance to think long thoughts about the future (praying that we yet have one, dear God), and so I have, and so this is the last column of Mr. Blue, under my authorship, for Salon.
- Over the years, Mr. Blue's strongest advice has come down on the side of freedom in our personal lives, freedom from crushing obligation and overwork and family expectations and the freedom to walk our own walk and be who we are. And some of the best letters have been addressed to younger readers trapped in jobs like steel suits, advising them to bust loose and go off and have an adventure. Some of the advisees have written back to inform Mr. Blue that the advice was taken and that the adventure changed their lives. This was gratifying.
- So now I am simply taking my own advice. Cut back on obligations: Promote a certain elegant looseness in life. Simple as that. Winter and spring, I almost capsized from work, and in the summer I had a week in St. Mary's Hospital to sit and think, and that's the result. Every dog has his day and I've had mine and given whatever advice was mine to give (and a little more). It was exhilarating to get the chance to be useful, which is always an issue for a writer (What good does fiction do?), and Mr. Blue was a way to be useful. Nothing human is beneath a writer's attention; the basic questions about how to attract a lover and what to do with one once you get one and how to deal with disappointment in marriage are the stuff that fiction is made from, so why not try to speak directly? And so I did. And now it's time to move on.
Personal information
Garrison Keillor was born in Anoka, Minnesota. He is six feet, four inches tall and is of Norwegian and Scottish ancestry. Keillor is a Lutheran, and a liberal Democrat. He graduated from the University of Minnesota with a bachelor's degree in English in 1966. While there, he began his broadcasting career on the student-operated radio station, known today as Radio K.
References
Keillor, Garrison. In search of Lake Wobegon (http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0012/feature5/index.html). National Geographic. Dec. 2000.
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Garrison Keillor
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