Facts about Garrison Keillor
Garrison Keillor Biography
Garrison Keillor is an author, storyteller, humorist, and creator of the long-running weekly radio show A Prairie Home Companion.
The show began in 1974 as a live variety show on Minnesota Public Radio, where Keillor had worked since 1969. Later syndicated nationally on public radio, A Prairie Home Companion became a pop culture phenomenon in the 1980s, with millions of Americans listening to Garrison Keillor’s folksy tales of life in the fictional Midwestern town of Lake Wobegon, where (in Keillor’s words) “the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all of the children are above average.”
A burned-out Keillor ended the show in 1987, but in 1989 began a similar new radio show titled American Radio Company of the Air. In 1993 he bowed to the obvious and returned the show to its original name.
Garrison Keillor also created the syndicated daily radio feature A Writer’s Almanac, which ran from 1993-2017. He has written for The New Yorker and is the author of several books, including Happy to Be Here (1990), Leaving Home (1992), Lake Wobegon Days (1995), and Good Poems for Hard Times (2005).
Keillor retired from A Prairie Home Companion in 2016; the show continued with a new host in mandolinist Chris Thile. Keillor continued to work for Minnesota Public Radio until he was fired in November of 2017 for “improper behavior with an individual who worked with him.” For a time, MPR removed all archives of A Prairie Home Companion and A Writer’s Almanac from its online archives, but eventually returned them. Keillor has since taken to touring with A Prairie Home Companion shows at the holidays and other times.
Keillor’s radio show inspired a 2006 movie, A Prairie Home Companion, written by and starring Keillor and directed by Robert Altman.
Extra credit
Garrison Keillor graduated from the University of Minneosta in 1966… His signature sign-off on The Writer’s Almanac is “Be well, do good work, and keep in touch”… A Prairie Home Companion was Altman’s last film; he died later that year. The film also starred Meryl Streep and Lindsay Lohan… Garrison Keillor planned to retire “in the spring of 2013,” he said in an interview with AARP magazine in March of 2011. However, a year later he told Rodney Ho of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he had changed his mind: “Since I said that, I thought about it some more and realized I didn’t want to do that after all. You don’t want to walk down that slippery slope too soon because if you do, other things may happen.”
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Something in Common with Garrison Keillor
- Radio Personalities born in Minnesota (2)
- Writers born in Minnesota (7)
- Writers born in the United States (343)
- Leo Writers (56)
4 Good Links
- Official site and archives of Garrison Keillor's famous radio show
- Nice 2011 interview with AARP Magazine, with Keillor saying (wrongly) that he would retire soon
- From 2006, but still snappy: Slate examines Keillor's "mysterious appeal"
- National Public Radio reports on the bummer end of his tenure