Garrison Keillor is the author of
ten books and the host of A Prairie Home Companion, heard weekly on
public radio
stations from coast to coast.
Keillor was born in Anoka, Minnesota, in 1942. He started in radio
as a freshman at the University of Minnesota, at a
closed-circuit station, WMMR, then at KUOM, and was hired by Minnesota
Public Radio in 1969, where he has been ever
since, with a few years off here and there for good behavior.
On July 6, 1974, he did the first broadcast of A Prairie Home
Companion, before an audience of twenty persons in a
theater in St. Paul. (The show ended in 1987, resumed in 1989 in New
York as The American Radio Company, resumed the
name A Prairie Home Companion in 1993 and returned to Minnesota.) It is
now heard each week on more than 410 public
radio stations by approximately 2.2 million listeners. Keillor also
hosts a daily five-minute program, The Writer's
Almanac. He is a frequent contributor to Time magazine, and the author
of ten books, including Lake Wobegon Days
(1985) and The Book of Guys (1993), and his latest book, coming out in
late October, Wobegon Boy, the saga of John
Tollefson, last seen leaving home in Lake Wobegon Days.
Keillor's recording of Lake Wobegon Days received a Grammy Award;
he has also received two ACE Awards for cable TV
and a George Foster Peabody Award. In 1994, he was inducted into the
Radio Hall of Fame at the Museum of Broadcast
Communications in Chicago.
As for his off-stage life, Keillor says:
"It was a summer of travel - to Denmark and Sweden and to Scotland
for the Edinburgh Book Festival - and now my wife
and I are settling in for a quiet fall and a peaceable winter. I turned
55 this summer, a very cheerful day made even more
so by a visit from two of my high school English teachers, Helen Story
and Lois Melby, who are bright and funny and
nimble and in their early eighties, and as always, a great inspiration.
"I finished a book in August, which is a great relief -
immediately, one's mind is free to consider the next big project. Some
disappointments: a movie script that I slaved over and wrote and
rewrote has languished, and a TV pilot went nowhere,
but neither of those are really nettlesome disappointments. I got far
enough with the TV pilot project to see that
commercial network television is another world entirely from public
radio. Smart people in television, but I don't envy
them, having to produce work that they themselves don't relish.
"And life is good here. My children are well and busily occupied
and seem to enjoy my company, my parents are in good
spirits and enjoying life in the slow track, and my friends are feisty
and loyal and full of interesting tales, and as for me, I
got to look at the inside of my heart with an ultrasound machine and it
was still pumping and, according to experts, is
likely to continue for awhile, and where there's life, there's hope.
"I work too hard, and I feel dulled by it, but I am married to a
lively woman, and together we make good company. She is a
tireless reader, a lover of opera and theater, she knows the names of
flowers and trees and birds, she is good-hearted and
wickedly funny, and, as I have told her many times, she is good to be
married to. In the next year, I hope to begin writing a
play, start a new novel, and compile an anthology of poems from The
Writer's Almanac. Most of all I hope to enjoy this
new season of our old show."
