Garrison Keillor

Early life and education

Keillor was born in Anoka, Minnesota, the son of Grace Ruth (née Denham) and John Philip Keillor. His father was a carpenter and postal worker of English ancestry; Keillor's paternal grandfather was from Kingston, Ontario. His maternal grandparents were Scottish emigrants from Glasgow. He was the third of six children, with three brothers and two sisters.

Keillor's family belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, an Evangelical Christian movement that he has since left. In 2006, he told Christianity Today that he was attending the St. John the Evangelist Episcopal church in Saint Paul, Minnesota, after previously attending a Lutheran church in New York.

Keillor graduated from Anoka High School in 1960 and from the University of Minnesota with a bachelor's degree in English in 1966. During college, he began his broadcasting career on the student-operated radio station known today as Radio K.

In his 2004 book Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America, Keillor mentions some of his noteworthy ancestors, including John Crandall, who was an associate of Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island and the first American Baptist church; and Prudence Crandall, who founded the first African-American women's school in America.

Career

Radio

Garrison Keillor started his professional radio career in November 1969 with Minnesota Educational Radio (MER), later Minnesota Public Radio (MPR), which today distributes programs under the American Public Media (APM) brand. He hosted a weekday drive-time broadcast called A Prairie Home Entertainment, on KSJR FM at St. John's University in Collegeville. The show's eclectic music was a major divergence from the station's usual classical fare. During this time he submitted fiction to The New Yorker magazine, where his first story for that publication, "Local Family Keeps Son Happy," appeared in September 1970.

Keillor resigned from The Morning Program in February 1971 in protest of what he considered interference with his musical programming; as part of his protest, he played nothing but the Beach Boys' "Help Me, Rhonda" during one broadcast. When he returned to the station in October, the show was dubbed A Prairie Home Companion.

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. In August 1973, MPR announced plans to broadcast a Saturday night version of A Prairie Home Companion with live musicians.

A Prairie Home Companion (PHC) debuted as an old-style variety show before a live audience on July 6, 1974; it featured 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 for PHC fictitious sponsors such as Powdermilk Biscuits, the Ketchup Advisory Board, and the Professional Organization of English Majors (POEM); it presented parodic serial melodramas, such as The Adventures of Guy Noir, Private Eye and The Lives of the Cowboys. Keillor voiced Noir, the cowboy Lefty, and other recurring characters, and provided lead or backup vocals for some of the show's musical numbers. The show aired from the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul.

After the show's intermission, Keillor read clever and often humorous greetings to friends and family at home submitted by members of the theater audience in exchange for an honorarium. Also in the second half of the show, Keillor delivered a monologue called The News from Lake Wobegon, a fictitious town based in part on Keillor's hometown of Anoka, Minnesota, and on Freeport and other small towns in Stearns County, Minnesota, where he lived in the early 1970s. Lake Wobegon is a quintessentially Minnesota small town characterized by the narrator as a place "... where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average."

Writing

At age 13, Keillor adopted the pen name "Garrison" to distinguish his personal life from his professional writing. He commonly uses "Garrison" in public and in other media.

Keillor has been called "[o]ne of the most perceptive and witty commentators about Midwestern life" by Randall Balmer in Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism. He has written numerous magazine and newspaper articles and more than a dozen books for adults as well as children. In addition to writing for The New Yorker, he has written for The Atlantic Monthly and National Geographic. He has also written for Salon.com and authored an advice column there under the name "Mr. Blue." Following a heart operation, he resigned on September 4, 2001, his last column being titled "Every dog has his day":

In 2004, Keillor published a collection of political essays, Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America, and in June 2005 he began a column called The Old Scout, which ran at Salon.com and in syndicated newspapers. The column went on hiatus in April 2010 so that he could "finish a screenplay and start writing a novel."

Bookselling

On November 1, 2006, Keillor opened an independent bookstore, "Common Good Books, G. Keillor, Prop." in the Blair Arcade Building at the southwest corner of Selby and N. Western Avenues in the Cathedral Hill area in the Summit-University neighborhood of Saint Paul, Minnesota.

In April 2012, the store moved to a new location on Snelling Avenue across from Macalester College in the Macalester-Groveland neighborhood. In April 2019, Keillor sold his interest in the bookstore. The store was renamed Next Chapter and is in the same location.

Voice-over work

Probably owing in part to his distinctive North-Central accent, Keillor is often used as a voice-over actor. Some notable appearances include:

Voiceover artist for Honda UK's "the Power of Dreams" campaign. The campaign's most memorable advertisement is the 2003 Honda Accord commercial Cog, which features a Heath Robinson contraption (or Rube Goldberg machine) made entirely of car parts. The commercial ends with Keillor asking, "Isn't it nice when things just work?" Since then, Keillor has voiced the tagline for most if not all UK Honda advertisements, and even sang the voiceover in the 2004 Honda Diesel commercial Grrr.

Voice of the Norse god Odin in an episode of the Disney animated series Hercules

Voice of Walt Whitman and other historical figures in Ken Burns's documentary series The Civil War and Baseball

Narrator of "River of Dreams" Documentary at the National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium in Dubuque, Iowa

In 1991, Keillor released Songs of the Cat, an album of original and parody songs about cats.

Film

In 2006, Keillor wrote and portrayed himself in the musical comedy film A Prairie Home Companion, directed by Robert Altman. It is a fictional representation of behind-the-scenes activities at the long-running public radio show of the same name. The film received mostly positive reviews and was a moderate box-office success on a small budget. It features an ensemble cast including Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Kline, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen, John C. Reilly, Maya Rudolph, Meryl Streep, and Lily Tomlin.

Reception

In a 2006 essay in Slate, Sam Anderson called Keillor "very clearly a genius. His range and stamina alone are incredible—after 30 years, he rarely repeats himself—and he has the genuine wisdom of a Cosby or Mark Twain." But Keillor's "willful simplicity," Anderson wrote, "is annoying because, after a while, it starts to feel prescriptive. Being a responsible adult doesn't necessarily mean speaking slowly about tomatoes." Anderson also noted that in 1985, when Time magazine called Keillor the funniest man in America, Bill Cosby said, "That's true if you're a pilgrim."

In popular culture

Keillor's style, particularly his speaking voice, has often been parodied.

In The Simpsons episode "Marge on the Lam", the family watches a Keillor-like monologist on television and does not find him funny.

On the November 19, 2011, episode of Saturday Night Live, cast member Bill Hader impersonated Keillor in a sketch depicting celebrities auditioning to replace Regis Philbin as co-host of Live! with Kelly.

One Boston radio critic likens Keillor and his "down-comforter voice" to "a hypnotist intoning, 'You are getting sleepy now'," while noting that Keillor does play to listeners' intelligence.

Pennsylvanian singer-songwriter Tom Flannery wrote a song in 2003 titled "I Want a Job Like Garrison Keillor's."

Two parody books by "Harrison Geillor", The Zombies of Lake Woebegotten and The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten, were published by Night Shade Books in 2010 and 2011.

Personal life

Keillor is a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. He is 6 ft 3 in (191 cm) tall. He considers himself a loner and prefers not to make eye contact with people. Though not formally diagnosed, he also considers himself to be on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum. He spoke about his experiences as an autistic person in his keynote address at the 19th Annual Minnesota Autism Conference in 2014.

Keillor has been married three times. He was married to Mary Guntzel from 1965 to 1976; they had one son. From 1985 to 1990 he was married to Ulla Skaerved, a former exchange student from Denmark at Keillor's high school whom he re-encountered at a class reunion. In 1995, Keillor married classical string player Jenny Lind Nilsson (born 1957), who is also from Keillor's home town of Anoka, Minnesota. They have one daughter.

Between his first and second marriages, Keillor was romantically involved with Margaret Moos, who worked as a producer of A Prairie Home Companion.

On September 7, 2009, Keillor was briefly hospitalized after suffering a minor stroke. He returned to work a few days later.

In 2006, after a visit to a United Methodist church in Highland Park, Texas, Keillor created a local controversy with his remarks about the event, including the rhetorical suggestion of a connection between event participants and supporters of torture and a statement creating an impression of political intimidation: "I walked in, was met by two burly security men ... and within 10 minutes was told by three people that this was the Bushes' church and that it would be better if I didn't talk about politics." In response, the lecture series coordinator said the two "burly security men" were a local policeman and the church's own security supervisor, both present because the agreement with Keillor's publisher specified that the venue provide security. In addition, the coordinator said that Keillor arrived at the church, declined an introduction, and took the stage without an opportunity to mingle with the audience, so he did not know when these warnings might have been dispensed. The publicist concurred, saying that Keillor did not have contact with any church members or people in the audience before he spoke.

Awards and other recognition

A Prairie Home Companion received a Peabody Award in 1980.

Keillor received a Medal for Spoken Language from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1990.

In 1994, Keillor was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame.

He received a National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1999.

In 2007, The Moth, a NYC-based not-for-profit storytelling organization, awarded Garrison Keillor the first Moth Award – Honoring the Art of the Raconteur at the annual Moth Ball.

In September 2007, Keillor was awarded the 2007 John Steinbeck Award, given to artists who capture "the spirit of Steinbeck's empathy, commitment to democratic values, and belief in the dignity of the common man."

Keillor received a Grammy Award in 1988 for his recording of Lake Wobegon Days.

In 2016, he received the Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature.

He has also received two CableACE Awards and a George Foster Peabody Award.