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Garrison Keillor came to national
attention through an old-fashioned, outmoded medium—the radio. His show,
called "A Prairie Home Companion," was broadcast from 1974 to 1987 in Minnesota
before live audiences on Saturday nights and included country music, yodeling,
and even dog acts. But the act that all the listeners waited for was the
monologue by Keillor, which always opened, "It has been a quiet week in
Lake Wobegon, my hometown." He then usually described some incident and
meandered off into a series of comic anecdotes, delivered in deadpan, which
went further and further afield until the listeners thought he had lost
his train of thought—but no: he always found his way back and connected
with the opening. The audience knew when the monologue was over because
it always concluded with: "That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all
the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are
above average." He delivered the monologue without a script.
Lake Wobegon, a town of 942 people
solely of his invention, took its place among the famous mythical towns
of America, such as Spoon River, Illinois; Winesburg, Ohio; and Gopher
Prairie, Minnesota. Listeners yearned to drop in at the Chatterbox Café
and taste the meatloaf or tunafish hotdish, or shop at Ralph's Pretty Good
Grocery, whose motto was, "If you can't get it at Ralph's, you can probably
get along without it."
Like the other mythical American
towns, Lake Wobegon was an imaginative creation, but its model existed
in its creator's past. Keillor was born in Anoka, Minnesota, and attended
the University of Minnesota, where he took a B.A. in 1966. For the next
two years (1966-68), he did graduate work in English at the University.
But in 1963, while an undergraduate, he had launched a radio program and
by 1971 had become a producer-announcer. He was awarded the George Foster
Peabody Broadcasting Award in 1980 and the Edward R. Murrow Award for Public
Broadcasting in 1985.
Critics have seen Keillor as directly
in the tradition of native American humor, in a line running from Mark
Twain through Will Rogers to James Thurber. Like these predecessors, Keillor
has a serious side to his stories. His monologues, he has said, celebrate
the "pleasures of the familiar....one of the themes of the stories is the
theme of small pleasures, and one thing I've tried to give myself over
to in the course of telling these stories is to stand in praise of common
and modest things. And that really is at the heart of Lake Wobegon."
Keillor's books include Happy
to Be Here (1981), Lake Wobegon Days (1985), and Leaving
Home: A Collection of Lake Wobegon Stories (1987). The title of the
last book has personal reference to Keillor's last year on the "Prairie
Home Companion" show and his departure from Minnesota. His first marriage
ended in divorce in 1976 and he remarried in 1985.
Leaving Home
opened with "A Letter from Copenhagen," where Keillor was then living with
his Danish wife. He said of the Lake Wobegon monologues: "These stories
are not about my family, and yet I hope they carry on our family tradition
of storytelling and kitchen talk, the way we talk and what we talk about."
Since that book appeared, Keillor
has resettled with his family in New York, where he is on the staff of
The New Yorker magazine. Some of his pieces appear in the "Talk
of the Town" section which introduces each issue, and others appear as
stories or sketches over his name. He has written about the publication
for which he works: "My people weren't much for literature, and they were
dead set against conspicuous wealth, so a magazine in which classy paragraphs
marched down the aisle between columns of diamond necklaces and French
cognacs was not a magazine they welcomed into their home. I was more easily
dazzled than they, and to me The New Yorker was a fabulous sight....
What I most admired was not the decor or the tone of the thing but rather
the work of some writers." Keillor first read those writers in The New
Yorker when he was fourteen. Now the boy from Anoka, Minnesota, is
one of them. Many of the pieces written for The New Yorker are collected
in We Are Still Married: Stories and Letters (1989).
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