Garrison Keillor at a 2007 performance of A Prairie Home Companion in Lanesboro, Minnesota

Birth name

Gary Edward Keillor

Born

August 07, 1942 (1942-08-07) (age 64)

Anoka, Minnesota, United States

Medium

Radio, Print

Nationality

American

Years active

1969-present

Genres

Observational comedy, Satire

Subject(s)

American culture (esp. the Midwest); American politics

Spouse

Mary Guntzel (1965-1976)

Ulla Skaerved 1985-1990

Jenny Lind Nilsson (1995-present)

Notable works and roles

Himself, Guy Noir, Lefty, Bob Burger, and Lake Wobegon narrator in A Prairie Home Companion

Garrison Keillor (born Gary Edward Keillor on August 7, 1942) is an American author, humorist, columnist, musician, satirist, and radio personality.

He is best known as 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 was born in Anoka, Minnesota, and raised in a family belonging to the Plymouth Brethren, a fundamentalist Christian denomination he has since left. He is six feet, four inches (1.93 m) tall and is of Scottish ancestry. Keillor is a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. He is currently an Episcopalian, but has been a Lutheran; he often uses his religious roots in his material. 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.

Keillor has been married three times:

The Keillors maintain homes on the Upper West Side of New York City and in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Keillor has many note-worthy ancestors including Joseph Crandall (who made progress in the studies of Native American languages), who was also an associate of Roger Williams (who founded the first American Baptist church as well as Rhode Island) and Prudence Crandall (who founded the first African-American women's school in America).

Keillor began his radio career in November 1969 with Minnesota Educational Radio (MER), now Minnesota Public Radio (MPR). He hosted The Morning Program in the weekday drive time-slot, 6 am to 9 am, which the station called "A Prairie Home Entertainment." During this time he also began submitting fiction to The New Yorker, where his first story, "Local Family Keeps Son Happy," appeared September 19, 1970.

Keillor resigned from The Morning Program in February 1971 to protest what he considered an attempt to interfere with his musical programming. The show became A Prairie Home Companion when he returned in October.

Keillor has attributed the idea for the live Saturday night radio program to his 1973 assignment to write about the Grand Ole Opry for The New Yorker, but he had already begun showcasing local musicians on the morning show, despite limited studio space for them, and in August 1973 The Minneapolis Tribune reported MER's plans for a Saturday night version of A Prairie Home Companion with live musicians.

A Prairie Home Companion debuted as an old-style variety show before a live audience on July 6, 1974, featuring guest musicians and a cadre cast doing musical numbers and comic skits replete with elaborate live sound effects. The show was punctuated by spoof commercial spots from such fictitious sponsors as Jack's Autoharp and Powdermilk Biscuits, "the biscuits that give shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done." Later imaginary sponsors have included Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery ("If you can't get it at Ralph's, you can probably get along without it."), Bertha's Kitty Boutique, the Catchup Advisory Board [sic] (which touted "the natural mellowing agents of ketchup"), the Duct Tape Council, and Beebopareebop Rhubarb Pie ("sweetening the sour taste of failure through the generations"). The show also contains parodic serial melodramas, such as The Adventures of Guy Noir, Private Eye and The Lives of the Cowboys. After the show's intermission, Keillor reads clever and often humorous greetings to friends and family at home, submitted by members of the theater audience. Also in the second half of the show, the broadcasts showcased a weekly monologue by Keillor entitled The News from Lake Wobegon, based in part on Keillor's own hometown of Anoka, Minnesota. Lake Wobegon is a quintessential but fictional Midwestern small town "where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average." The first show was in 1974, and the program became successful. It ran until 1987, when Keillor decided to end it; he worked on other projects, including another live radio program, "The American Radio Company", for several years. In 1993 he began producing A Prairie Home Companion again, with nearly identically-formatted programs, and has done so since. On A Prairie Home Companion, Keillor receives no billing or credit; his name is never mentioned, except occasionally by a guest addressing him by his first name.

Keillor is also the host of The Writer's Almanac which, like A Prairie Home Companion, is produced and distributed by American Public Media. The Writer's Almanac is also available online and via daily e-mail installments by subscription.

Keillor has written many magazine and newspaper articles, and nearly a dozen books for adults as well as children. In addition to his time as a writer for The New Yorker, he has also written for The Atlantic Monthly, and Salon.com.

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":

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.

In June 2005, Keillor started a syndicated newspaper column on Salon.com called "The Old Scout."

Keillor wrote the screenplay for the 2006 movie version of A Prairie Home Companion, which was directed by Robert Altman. (Keillor also appears in the movie.)

Keillor also recently published a collection of political essays as Homegrown Democrat.

On November 1, 2006, Keillor opened an independent bookstore in the historic Cathedral Hill area of Saint Paul, Minnesota. "Common Good Books, G. Keillor, Prop." is located at the southwest corner of Selby and N. Western Avenues, (Blair Arcade Building, Suite 14, in the basement, below Nina's Coffee Cafe). The Cathedral Hill area is located in one of the St. Paul neighborhoods called Summit-University. For coverage of the bookstore opening, see this article that appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

In 2007, Keillor wrote a column which, in part, criticized "stereotypical" same-sex parents, who he said were "sardonic fellows with fussy hair who live in over-decorated apartments with a striped sofa and a small weird dog and who worship campy performers." In response to the strong reactions of many readers, Keillor apologized, saying

I live in a small world...in which gayness is as common as having brown eyes.... But in the larger world, gayness is controversial...and so gay people feel besieged to some degree and rightly so.... My column spoke as we would speak in my small world and it was read by people in the larger world and thus the misunderstanding. .

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