Garrison Keillor

• Born: August 7, 1942
• Place of Birth: Anoka, Minnesota

Biography

Gary Edward Keillor was born August 7, 1942, in Anoka, Minnesota, the son of John Philip and Grace Ruth Denham Keillor. His father was a railway mail clerk and carpenter. Keillor attended the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis, where he worked as a staff announcer for the campus station, KUOM radio, from 1963 to 1968. This job began a long career in radio, during which he took the more formal Garrison Keillor as his professional name. He married Mary C. Guntzel on September 11, 1965, and they had a son, Jason.

Keillor received a bachelor's degree from the University of Minnesota in 1966 and briefly sought a writing job in New York. He had hoped to join the staff of The New Yorker, a magazine he had admired since boyhood. He was not at that time successful, so he continued in broadcasting. In 1971, he began working as an announcer and producer with Minnesota Public Radio in St. Paul. In 1974, he launched the highly successful weekly program A Prairie Home Companion, for which he served as host and principal writer. He was divorced in May, 1976.

A Prairie Home Companion, inspired by the Grand Ole Opry radio program, was broadcast live before a theater audience on Saturday nights. The program initially ran for more than a decade. It was carried by more than two hundred public radio stations and was televised during the 1987 season. It was a variety show made up of an eclectic musical component, comic sketches (written or cowritten by Keillor), and the host’s weekly monologue about the goings-on in his fictional hometown of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. Keillor’s leisurely monologues drew heavily upon his small-town upbringing, although he has always insisted that Lake Wobegon is a romantic creation, not a caricature of his actual hometown.

Keillor grew up in a Fundamentalist sect called the Plymouth Brethren, whose strictures made other Fundamentalist denominations appear rather “loose.” The monologues often treated the American practice of Christianity humorously but also gently and affectionately. A Prairie Home Companion was interspersed with commercials for fictitious businesses and products: Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, Bertha’s Kitty Boutique, the Chatterbox Cafe, Bob’s Bank, the Sidetrack Tap, Scottie’s Cough Syrup for Dogs, and—most popular of all—Powdermilk Biscuits.

Although never perhaps reaching the mass audience available to commercial radio, the show was a phenomenal popular success for public broadcasting. It was a critical success, receiving the George Foster Peabody Broadcasting Award in 1980 and the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1985. On December 29, 1985, Keillor married Ulla Skaerved, a social worker and a native of Denmark. Together they had four children.

During the initial run of A Prairie Home Companion, Keillor, who had contributed to The New Yorker and other magazines for several years, published three books: G. K. the DJ (1977); Happy to Be Here (1982), followed by an expanded edition in 1983; and Lake Wobegon Days (1985). The success of these—especially the latter, which was a huge best-seller—helped to broaden his listening audience. The growing popularity of the show eventually prompted a special on public television, which was followed by a regular spot on the schedule of the Disney Channel.

In 1987, Keillor announced that he was ending the show so that he could move with his wife and family to her native country. There, having freed himself from the weekly grind of producing and performing, he would devote himself to his writing. A Prairie Home Companion had been based in and around St. Paul during its entire tenure on the air, and the last regularly scheduled show in its first incarnation was broadcast from that city on June 13, 1987.

Keillor soon brought out two more books: Leaving Home (1987) and We Are Still Married (1989). He did move to Copenhagen but lived there for only a few months before returning to the United States. He and his family took up residence in New York City, where he became formally associated with The New Yorker. He also returned to radio, which he admitted to missing more than he had anticipated. He performed at the National Convention of the Democratic Party at Atlanta, Georgia, in 1988, presaging a more overtly political element in his writing. He also began a series of annual “farewell performances” of A Prairie Home Companion. The first was broadcast and telecast from New York City in 1988, the second from Dallas, Texas, 1989. In the autumn of 1989, he launched a new show on public radio; it originated in New York City and had a different title—The American Radio Company—and cast, as well as an altered format. In 1990, he toured with a two-man show, featuring himself and guitarist Chet Atkins, a frequent guest on the old A Prairie Home Companion. However, Keillor’s fans soon wanted A Prairie Home Companion back on their radios, and Keillor was forced in 1993 to bring Lake Wobegon back to his listeners every week. Both Keillor and A Prairie Home Companion returned to St. Paul, Minnesota. The revived show continues and remains popular into the twenty-first century.

During the 1990’s, Keillor continued to produce collections of humorous sketches and short stories: The Book of Guys (1993) and Truckstop, and Other Lake Wobegon Stories (1995). WLT: A Radio Romance (1991), Wobegon Boy (1998), Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 (2001), and Love Me (2003) are more truly novelistic in form than were his earlier book-length works. He wrote three books for children: Cat, You Better Come Home (1995), The Old Man Who Loved Cheese (1996), and The Sandy Bottom Orchestra (1996), the last of which he co-wrote with his third wife, violinist Jenny Lind Nilsson.

Keillor’s political opinions had grown more obvious over time, but he had never pressed them overtly until the publication of Me: By Jimmy (Big Boy) Valente, Governor of Minnesota, as told to Garrison Keillor (1999) and Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America (2004). The former reflected an ongoing feud between the writer and Jesse “The Body” Ventura, a former professional wrestler and the governor of his home state from 1999 to 2002. The latter offered encouragement to his fellow Democrats during a period that he believed to be dominated by conservative politics. Keillor ventured into yet another genre when he edited Good Poems (2002) and Good Poems for Hard Times (2005).

Keillor was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001. In 2014, he published a collection of his stories, poems, and essays The Keillor Reader. He left the Prairie Home Companion radio show in July 2016. To begin his retirement in April of 2017, at the age of seventy-five, he announced his new twenty-eight city Prairie Home Love & Comedy Tour.

A year after he retired from the show, Keillor was accused of inappropriate sexual advances by a woman who had worked with him. Although Keillor denied the accusations, Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) ended its association with the author and radio star. A further investigation by MPR found several other women who reported being sexualized or mistreated by Keillor. Although the Prairie Home Companion had a new host, MPR changed its name to Live From Here to avoid any connection to Keillor. The show was canceled during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite his fall from grace, Keillor remained active, writing several books, including That Time of Year: A Minnesota Life (2020) and Cheerfulness (2023). He also resumed his live tours. In 2024, Keillor embarked on an eighteen-city US tour to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of a Prairie Home Companion.

Analysis

With the publication of his third book, Lake Wobegon Days, Keillor was crowned the new Mark Twain. He consistently disavowed the epithet, insisting that he had no such grand illusions about his work. He turned the comparison aside with a jest by remarking that the Eastern literary establishment considered any humorist from west of Eighth Avenue the new Mark Twain.

Still, the comparison was understandable. Keillor, like Twain, was the product of a small town in middle America. Twain’s best work featured the mighty Mississippi River, which he had known intimately from boyhood. Keillor’s popular broadcasts emanated from St. Paul, Minnesota, on the banks of the Mississippi. For The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Twain created the idyllic river town of St. Petersburg, and Keillor portrayed life in the mythical hamlet of Lake Wobegon. Like Twain, Keillor was at his best in the short story or sketch, and his long works, like Twain’s, often strung together such shorter pieces. Both men eventually moved to the East after making their reputations in the West (although Keillor returned to Minnesota). In the latter stages of their careers, both men became more satirical in their treatment of the politics of their day.

Twain attempted several times to give up his lecture tours but was forced to resume them because of financial need. In 1987, Keillor gave up the radio program that made him famous with the stated intention of devoting himself exclusively to writing. Although the decision took his fans by surprise, it probably should not have. On his show, he repeatedly referred to himself as a writer, suggesting clearly that his performance on stage was a subsidiary, not his primary, activity. He was, however, a brilliant monologuist with a rich speaking voice and impeccable comic timing. His old-fashioned, leisurely style of storytelling, which did not rely upon gags and never rushed in order to elicit laughter, was unique in modern show business. His regular listeners were understandably unwilling to see him give up something he did so remarkably well. After a few months, he announced that he would resume occasional performances of A Prairie Home Companion. These eventually led to a resumption of the show as again a Saturday night staple of public broadcasting. Keillor, who also had a pleasant singing voice, has regularly sung with his musical guests. He declared that this singing was what he had missed most during his brief absence from radio.

Keillor’s humor had a characteristically gentle tone, but it rangeed from good-natured farce to satire that was not always so gentle. He was selling whimsical pieces to The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly as early as 1970. His usual method was to take some American practice bordering upon absurdity, and embellish it into hilarity. His spoofs seemed to have no particular political orientation, no axe to grind. The satire was Horatian, gently chiding and essentially free of animus. Stories and sketches from this early period, from 1970 to 1982, were collected in his first successful book, Happy to Be Here.

Keillor’s period of great popularity, both as a writer and a performer, was inaugurated by an article he did on the Grand Ole Opry in the spring of 1974. This piece, which appeared in The New Yorker, was the biggest sale he had made up to that time, but, more important, it started him thinking about the possibility of doing a radio show modeled after the original Grand Ole Opry. Keillor believed that over the years that program had strayed from its original simplicity and lack of pretension. He would attempt to recapture these qualities in a live broadcast done before a theater audience and directed toward whatever group of people would stay home on Saturday evenings to listen to the radio. The result was A Prairie Home Companion.

The show has had an anachronistic quality about it from the beginning. It features old bluegrass and gospel numbers. The central segment of the show has come to be Keillor’s long monologue on the week’s happenings in his imaginary hometown, Lake Wobegon. For many listeners, A Prairie Home Companion was a repository of traditional midwestern—and, by extension, American—virtues. Such adjectives as old-fashioned, wholesome, clean, and decent were frequently applied to Keillor’s humor.

Lake Wobegon Days was, among other things, a history of the hamlet from its founding to the present day. The book was greeted with overwhelming approval by both the reading public and the critics. In Leaving Home, Keillor rewrote and collected thirty-six Lake Wobegon monologues from the show. We Are Still Married is composed of stories, sketches, letters, and light verse. Although the Keillor persona of the preceding three books dominated the text, it is fair to say these pieces were more urban, more personal, more political, and more caustic than the earlier work. This book struck a tone that would evolve and become more pronounced in the books to follow.

To return to the comparison that Keillor resisted, he may have attempted to do what Mark Twain also attempted (without much success). Twain eventually became somewhat embarrassed by his frontier persona and wished instead to be remembered as the author of Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896). Keillor’s appealing humor and literary craftsmanship certainly predate his creation of Lake Wobegon, but many of his readerscame to love the residents of that little town and were reluctant to give them up.

Happy to Be Here

First published: 1982

Type of work: Short stories

The fads, fashions, and everyday absurdities of contemporary American life are treated in roughly thirty short comic pieces.

Happy to Be Here is subtitled Stories and Comic Pieces. The original version contains twenty-nine selections and is divided into five parts. An expanded edition appeared the next year. Most of the selections can be classified as short stories, although some are parodies of other genres or brief comic sketches. Most are humorous, although a few are mood pieces that scarcely rely upon humor at all. The book’s title story, which originally appeared in The New Yorker under the title “Found Paradise,” is a monologue by a writer who has left the city for the dubious paradise of a Minnesota farm. It is an example of the polarity found in so much of Keillor’s work: the narrator’s being tugged at simultaneously by the charm—and often the absurdity as well—of rural and small-town life on one hand and the glamour of the city on the other.

The reader meets quite a gallery of characters: The title character in “Jack Schmidt, Arts Administrator” is a private eye who has turned to grantsmanship on behalf of such clients as the Minnesota Anti-Dance Ensemble (they do not believe in performance). Don of “Don: The True Story of a Young Person” is the leader of Trash, a punk-rock band; Trash becomes famous—or notorious—for eating live chickens during its act. Slim of “The Slim Graves Show” presides over a country and western radio program that evolves into a singing soap opera, with the listening audience voting for its favorite member of the love triangle.

In “Friendly Neighbor,” Walter “Dad” Benson is the star of a curious radio show on which the fictional Benson family listens to another show, piped in from an adjoining studio. The show within the show is a dramatization of the family life of the Muellers, equally fictional. Mr. Mueller’s indiscretion at Christmastime, 1958, shocks the midwestern audience by setting such a poor example for Christian listeners, especially during the holy season. Dad strongly states his disapproval of Mr. Mueller’s decision to spend Christmas at his girlfriend’s house rather than with his wife and children. Dad’s audience is not placated, however, having decided that the Bensons probably should not have been listening to The Muellers to begin with; on New Year’s Day, 1959, the parent show, Friendly Neighbor, leaves the air. Keillor’s many years as a broadcaster in the Midwest are apparent throughout Happy to Be Here.

Keillor’s interest in baseball, evident in all of his books, is reflected in several pieces from Happy to Be Here. “Around the Home” is a parody of a sports column, the subject of which is a losing baseball team, the Flyers. Bill Home is sick, and his substitute columnist is a psychologist, much under the influence of I’m OK, You’re OK, a popular self-help work published in 1969. Ed Farr managed the team from a Fourth of July doubleheader until the end of the season, giving the players intense one-to-one and group therapy all along the way. He explains that the problems of the pitching staff resulted from their having suffered “pitcher’s block.” Similar problems in hitting and fielding resulted from the fans sending a clear message that the Flyers were not OK. Farr looks to the coming season with high hopes for his charges’ personal growth and increased self-esteem.

“Attitude” outlines the proper approach to playing slow-pitch softball. One should chatter continuously, spit frequently, pull up tufts of grass, and become involved with dirt. These mannerisms represent real ball and will compensate for any amount of inept play. “The New Baseball” argues that the existential response to modern life is altering the traditions of the game. The emphasis upon performance, the use of umpires, the keeping of the score—all will ultimately disappear. The static conventions of three strikes and three outs will wither away as players become more concerned with experiencing at-batness than with getting hits. The final salutary development will be the abandonment of the arbitrary distinction between player and spectator. “How Are the Legs, Sam?” examines the baseball career of the narrator, who played one game in 1965 and one game in 1966 and has been inactive from 1967 to 1970.

The final section of the book—containing the pieces “The Drunkard’s Sunday,” “Happy to Be Here,” and “Drowning 1954”—is more melancholy or wistful than humorous in tone. The collection represents the sort of work Keillor had been doing as a freelance contributor to The New Yorker; most of the pieces in the book, in fact, appeared originally in that magazine.

Lake Wobegon Days

First published: 1985

Type of work: Short stories

The novel is a portrait of the fictitious Minnesota town—its history and its current inhabitants.

The narrator is Garrison Keillor, but, like Dante in La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802), he must be understood to be a fictional character created by the author, not the author himself. The many small narratives are skillfully connected by means of association. The history of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, population 942, is interwoven with present-day events, the narrator’s childhood and adolescence, and his musings on the significance of being a Wobegonian. The two qualities that have defined Lake Wobegon life down through the years are happenstance and patience.

There are two contenders for the title of first European to arrive at what is now Lake Wobegon. In 1836, an Italian, Count Carlo Pallavicini, searching for the headwaters of the Mississippi River, took one look around and decided he was not there. The previous year, a French priest, Father Pierre Plaisir, had visited what the voyageurs came to call Lac Malheur, but, as he mentions nonexistent mountains in his memoir, he may well have been farther to the west.

Next, in the early 1850’s, came a party of Unitarian missionaries from Boston, led by Prudence Alcott, who intended to convert the Indians to Christianity by means of interpretive dance. The New Englanders gave the name New Albion to the village they settled. One of Miss Alcott’s companions, a poet named Henry Francis Watt, composed the first account of Lake Wobegon to reach the East, a poem of 648 lines titled “Phileopolis: A West Rhapsody—Thoughts Composed a Short Distance Above Lake Wobegon.” Watt, armed with the spurious degrees of Ph.D., Litt. D., and D.D. (all conferred upon him by a coffee broker and land speculator named Bayfield), established New Albion College. The college eventually boasted an enrollment of thirty-six but, after a bear ate one of the scholars, only one student remained for the following spring term. (It was later determined that his mind was unhinged, and he was removed to the state asylum.) New Albion College was forced to close its doors.

A group of Norwegians arrived on May 15, 1867. Having been fishermen in the old country, they had emigrated deep into the Dakota Territory under the mistaken notion that they would find a huge lake with bountiful fishing. On the weary return trip, they stopped and settled in Lake Wobegon. Then came the German immigrants, who were headed elsewhere but had misread their map. They chose to stay in Lake Wobegon rather than admit they had made a mistake. The Norwegians, who are Lutheran, and the Germans, who are Catholic, have become the dominant ethnic groups in Lake Wobegon. In 1880, the Norwegians finally gained control of the city council and officially changed the name of the town from New Albion to Lake Wobegon. They liked the sound of the word. Wobegon, or “Wa-be-gan-tan-han” in the Ojibway tongue, can be translated as “the place where we waited all day in the rain” or, more simply, as “patience.”

Lake Wobegon is located in the appropriately named Mist County. Unfortunately, because of a series of surveying errors, the town has never appeared on any map. When the legislature discovered that the lines drawn by four teams of surveyors had overlapped badly in the middle of the state, they simply reproportioned the state by eliminating the overlap. The result of this action was to remove all of Mist County from the map. Passage of the State Map Amendment of 1933 was an attempt to rectify the situation, but it was attached to a bill requiring the teaching of evolution in all secondary schools, and it failed. Wobegonians are sanguine about their official anonymity, just as they are about all of life’s vicissitudes. They have learned that things seldom work out.

A case in point is the town’s one genuine athletic hero, Wally (“Old Hard Hands”) Bunsen. Wally was a great ball player who had spent a part of the 1933 season with the Chicago Cubs, batting an impressive .348. As his nickname suggests, however, he had learned to play without a glove. A glove threw him off his game, and he begged to be allowed to play without one. The Cubs were adamant: No true major leaguer played without a glove. Wally came home. He died a tragic death in 1936 when he fouled an inside fast ball off his head while playing for the local team.

Keillor fleshes out his portrait of Lake Wobegon with descriptions of such local institutions as the Living Flag, the Sons of Knute lodge, the statue of the Unknown Norwegian, and the Viking runestone (which proves conclusively that Viking explorers visited Lake Wobegon in 1381). He layers the text with footnotes to fictitious sources: reference works, correspondence, even a book of etiquette. The reader is introduced to dozens of well-characterized residents of contemporary Lake Wobegon. Critics greeted the book almost unanimously as a comic tour de force.

Leaving Home

First published: 1987

Type of work: Short stories

Keillor reworked a number of his radio monologues, each about the week’s happenings in Lake Wobegon, into a collection of short stories.

The subtitle of Leaving Home forthrightly announces the nature of the volume: A Collection of Lake Wobegon Stories. Keillor had already performed each of the thirty-six stories as a monologue on A Prairie Home Companion. He announces at the beginning of the book that the stories have been altered somewhat from their original form.

The book’s title may be ambiguous. Some of the characters in the stories do leave home; others would like to, or dream of doing so. Still, the reader is tempted to apply the title to the author as much as to his characters. Keillor chooses to begin his book with the text of a song he sometimes sang on A Prairie Home Companion—the lament of an absent Wobegonian who longs to see the old hometown one more time.

This is followed by an introduction, “A Letter from Copenhagen,” dated July 3, 1987. Keillor muses therein about leaving behind one’s homeland and all that is familiar and also reminds the reader that he has left his radio show after thirteen years. Lake Wobegon came to life each week within the twenty-minute monologue which was the centerpiece of the show. Was Leaving Home the author’s last, long good-bye to Lake Wobegon? Two years later, his next book would contain only 66 pages of Lake Wobegon material out of a total of 330, and his new radio shows would feature no Lake Wobegon segment. However, in the years to follow, Keillor would be drawn back to Lake Wobegon material for both his fiction and his broadcasts.

In the stories themselves, there are plenty of characters who are leaving home. In “Darlene Makes a Move,” after thirteen years Darlene is leaving her job as waitress at the Chatterbox Cafe on January 1. She is going to Minneapolis to settle matters with Arlen, the husband with whom she has not lived for many years. Then she will seek adventure. In “A Glass of Wendy,” Father Emil, who has been pastor at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility for more than forty years, is retiring the day after Easter. In “Dale,” Dale Uecker leaves a blossoming relationship with Carla Krebsbach behind to go off to the Navy (after he finally finds the key to his car). In “David and Agnes, a Romance,” Val Tollefson reads his father’s love letters to the woman with whom he ran away in 1946.

Perhaps the most amusing of all the stories is “Truckstop.” Myrtle Krebsbach has decided, based upon the question-and-answer column in the newspaper, that she has cancer. She is required to go to Minneapolis for her examination, as the local physician, Dr. DeHaven, and all the doctors in nearby Saint Cloud have pronounced her cancer-free. She is driven by her husband, Florian, whose eyesight is poor and who has put only 47,000 miles on his 1966 Chevrolet. While Myrtle is using the ladies’ room at the truckstop, Florian absentmindedly drives off without her, then gets off the interstate highway and gets lost.

Each of the stories begins with the sentence, “It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon,” which was always the opening sentence of Keillor’s monologue on A Prairie Home Companion. In the final story, “Goodbye to the Lake,” the narrator, who is going to Copenhagen, takes a panoramic look at Lake Wobegon and its inhabitants on a rainy Wednesday in June. He announces that this will be his last view of them for a while. The writing in Leaving Home does not rise to the level of that in Lake Wobegon Days. The stories were originally written for oral delivery and do not require the stylistic dexterity found in so much of the earlier book. The stories are well constructed, however, and frequently employ Keillor’s familiar blend of comedy and pathos.

We Are Still Married

First published: 1989

Type of work: Short stories

This work is a comic potpourri of short stories, sketches, letters, and poems.

Although Keillor has always been at his best in the short narrative or the flawless anecdote, We Are Still Married conveys much more of the pastiche effect than do his previous three books. The political satire is harsher, more focused, and more partisan. A number of the pieces, while extremely entertaining, seemed mainly to be apologias for the author’s recent decisions regarding his personal and professional life.

“Reagan,” written just prior to the presidential election of 1988, is in places pure political commentary. “A Liberal Reaches for Her Whip” is more in the vein of earlier Keillor whimsy, but it, too, includes a direct attack upon presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and the political atmosphere they fostered in the United States. “Patmos,” the account of a trip to Greece, is sprinkled with comment on the fateful nature of the 1988 American presidential election. Previously, Keillor’s narrator persona generally responded with bemused tolerance for the foibles of his fellow man, including his political foibles. Keillor’s political commentary is exceedingly mild by comparison to the Juvenalian assaults launched daily by the Washington-based columnists; still, it was a relatively new—and, to some readers, troubling—aspect of his work.

Other pieces—“Who Do You Think You Are?,” “Regrets,” and “My Life in Prison”—hint at the strained relationships and acrimony that must have accompanied his termination of A Prairie Home Companion while it was at its peak in popularity and his subsequent move from St. Paul to Manhattan by way of Copenhagen. The reader recalls the segment in Lake Wobegon Days wherein Johnny Tollefson, prospective freshman at St. Cloud State College, is longing to change places with Tony Flambeau of the Flambeau Family mystery series. The Flambeaus have a spacious apartment overlooking Central Park. Emil Flambeau is a Nobel laureate microbiologist, Eileen Flambeau is a former screen star, and teenage Tony Flambeau drinks wine (Pouilly-Fuissé) with his parents and calls them by their first names. If Johnny Tollefson had actually succeeded in making it to Manhattan, he would surely have left some ruffled feathers behind him in Lake Wobegon.

We Are Still Married is composed of five sections. Section 1, “Pieces,” includes thirteen short works, highlighted by the brilliant parodies “The Current Crisis in Remorse,” “The Young Lutheran’s Guide to the Orchestra,” “A Little Help,” and “Lifestyle.” Section 2, “The Lake,” is a five-part miscellany featuring familiar characters from Lake Wobegon. Section 3, “Letters,” begins with a how-to essay on letter writing, which is followed by thirty-one letters of various sorts. “House Poems,” the fourth section, contains eleven pieces of entertaining light verse. “Stories,” the final section, is composed of eleven stories, the last of which also furnishes the title of the book.

Familiar motifs reappear—for example, sports and what they say about American attitudes. “Three New Twins Join Club in Spring” is a humorous response to the Minnesota Twins’ victory in the 1987 World Series, and “Home Team” is a bittersweet rumination on the same subject. “The Babe” recalls the day a sick, aging Babe Ruth came barnstorming through Lake Wobegon. “What Did We Do Wrong?” is a short story about Annie Szemanski, the first woman to play in the major leagues. “Basketball” recounts Keillor’s making three of four shots while taping a piece promoting the National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament for CBS, and “Puck Drop” describes his role in the season-opening ceremonies of the Minnesota North Stars.

The contents of We Are Still Married range from seventeen unsigned essays, observations, and reflections appearing much earlier in The New Yorker to selections that appeared in periodicals only shortly before their inclusion in the book. The narrator left Lake Wobegon in the last story in Leaving Home, and We Are Still Married seems to signal further movement away from that mythical community.

Wobegon Boy

First published: 1998

Type of work: Novel

John Tollefson finally moves east to manage a public radio station, but it seems, “You can take the boy out of Lake Wobegon, but you can’t take Lake Wobegon out of the boy.”

John Tollefson, Johnny of Lake Wobegon Days, is the first-person narrator of Wobegon Boy. John first leaves Lake Wobegon to attend the university in Minneapolis. There he carries on a ten-year affair with a young woman named Korlyss, “an extremely nice person” but “of a mournful disposition.” John finally goes east, not triumphantly as in his boyhood dreams but in a desperate flight from Korlyss, who has begun to insist upon marriage. He finds a job as manager of WSJO, a radio station on the campus of St. James College in Red Cliff, New York, on Cayuga Lake.

St. James is an Episcopalian institution with fine architecture, groomed lawns, and high tuition. Its admission requirements, on the other hand, are low; the dean of students refers to St. James as higher education for “the idiot children of the rich.” John falls into an undemanding relationship with Jean, a librarian, who never mentions marriage. He begins attending Episcopal Mass, celebrated by Mother Sally, whose every homily represents the New Testament as a feminist document.

One Sunday at Mass he meets Howard Freeman, who has decided to add a spiritual dimension to his life. Howard is an enthusiastic but unreliable entrepreneur. Together, John and Howard launch a business venture that John envisions as a farm restaurant, serving fresh vegetables grown on the premises. They hire Steve, a contractor who wears a long blond ponytail, running shoes, and a Grateful Dead T-shirt. Predictably, the enterprise goes bust. Yet Howard’s shortcomings are overshadowed by the fact that he has a beautiful sister, Alida, who will become the love of John’s life. Alida is four years younger than John and has lived the glamorous life for which he has always longed. She lives in New York City, where she teaches history at Columbia University. For a semester, she is a visiting professor at Berkeley. For two months, she does research in Copenhagen. She is writing a book on Susan B. Anthony’s lover. John plods on at WSJO.

Keillor shows no reluctance to bite the hand that feeds him. Wobegon Boy lampoons, hilariously and at length, public radio and its audience. WSJO goes on the air on Labor Day, 1985, with a Mozart marathon. The new dean, John’s superior at St. James, wants more Third World music—more diverse music in general. What about a Holocaust month for Jewish music? Why not set one day aside for women composers? Does John have an index to blind, deaf, and physically challenged composers? He is forced to hire as public affairs director a grim woman named Susan Mack. She produces a documentary on premature menopause. It is a “thoroughly mind-numbing piece of radio,” so naturally it receives a du Pont Award, and Susan goes on a speaking tour.

John hates talk radio, especially on public radio. The callers, says John, are obsessive academics, genteel bohemians with a Bambi worldview, ditzy New Agers, Luddites, drowsy voices dithering and blithering, and good and decent people with no real life experience but who are “deeply concerned.” The result, he says, is audio oatmeal. Keillor introduces as an example of the pompous public radio star Jonah Hadley, whose audio essays are characterized as liberal sermons with sound effects. Perhaps John’s no-nonsense Lutheran upbringing has ill prepared him for such pretension.

John flies home to Minnesota every July and December. There, the reader is reintroduced to familiar Lake Wobegonians. John’s mom and dad drive to Red Cliff for Thanksgiving; they like Alida, and she likes them. Mr. Tollefson, with whom John has always had an uneasy relationship, dies the following January at the age of seventy-three. Keillor devotes six chapters to the death, funeral, and wake. John is reunited with his four siblings: Bill, who has rectal bleeding; Diana, a lesbian who aspires to be an aromatherapist; Ronnie, a reformed drunk and former prison inmate, who is saved by Pastor Jeeter Packwood; and Judy, wife of Lake Wobegon’s Lutheran pastor. Family stories kindle an affection for his father that John never felt in life. When WSJO changes its format from classical music to talk, he welcomes the excuse to quit his job. In the final chapter, he moves to New York City, where, happily unemployed, he marries Alida and discovers that, like his great-grandfather—also named John—he is one of Lake Wobegon’s few Happy Lutherans.

Lake Wobegon Summer 1956

First published: 2001

Type of work: Novel

A fourteen-year-old boy suffers all the joys, pangs, and discoveries of adolescence during a pivotal summer.

Like Wobegon Boy, this novel is written in the first person. The first two-thirds of the narrative are told in the present, a highly unusual tense for long fiction. In chapter 18, “In the Press Box,” the narrative switches to past tense—for no apparent reason other than stylistic experimentation—and continues in that tense until the end of the novel. The narrator is Gary, Keillor’s birthname. Gary is fourteen in 1956, as was Keillor, and Gary dreams of becoming a writer, as Keillor did. It is, at first, difficult to avoid reading the novel as slightly disguised autobiography. However, upon further consideration, it could be the tale of any sensitive adolescent with artistic ambitions, growing up in a small town where such ambitions are not highly regarded.

The principal characters are Gary, his parents, his older sister, his Aunt Eva, his cousin Kate, and Grandpa and Jesus in Heaven. Daddy is head cashier at the bank but does not like dealing with people—they are so utterly ignorant of sound fiscal practices. Mother reads the newspaper, devoid of interest in politics, sports, and the lives of Hollywood stars but giddy with delight when reading about a juicy murder. The older sister is a constant pain in Gary’s side. She is both self-righteous and perceptive; she knows that inside Foxx’s Book of Martyrs, Gary is really reading High School Orgies. Aunt Eva has never married and has always lived on the family farm. When Daddy went into the Army in 1945, Mother and her three children went to live on the farm with her. (Gary has an older brother who is away at the university during the entire narrative.)

Gary is Aunt Eva’s favorite. Kate is Gary’s daring, sophisticated seventeen-year-old cousin. Grandpa and Jesus, in Gary’s imagination, are looking down from Heaven and commenting on his behavior; Grandpa is usually shocked and disappointed, while Jesus is consistently neutral.

Gary has two obsessions. The first, sex and all bodily functions, is typical of fourteen-year-old boys. The second, writing, is not. The family belongs to the Sanctified Brethren, the People of the Word, a very strict, and tiny, fundamentalist sect. They would not approve of Gary’s sexual fantasies. He continues to read his erotic magazines, despite the fact that his sister, much more under the influence of the Sanctified Brethren than he, threatens constantly to expose his sinful behavior. Kate is nothing like his sister. Though not an attractive girl, she is an appealing free spirit; she embodies womanhood to Gary. She gives him his first kiss after they have been drinking the communion wine. She smokes, reads The New Yorker, uses indelicate language, and one day wears no bra to school and lets Gary touch her breasts. His second obsession is fueled by his Uncle Sugar’s gift of a year-old Underwood typewriter. He writes stories that are wild and juvenile but indicative of his talent. One such story is “The Flaming Heart,” a tale of touring thespians Alfred L’Etoile and Jean du Nord and their adopted son Roy, who is blown by a tornado onto the farm of a Sanctified Brethren family.

Gary is crushed when Kate becomes pregnant and marries Roger Guppy, pitcher for the local team, the Whippets. He is positive that Roger has never read The New Yorker. In the final scene of the novel, Gary throws off all of his clothes and runs naked around the deserted baseball field. Grandpa, who once had hopes that Gary might become a preacher, looks down from Heaven and asks, “What’s going to become of him?” Jesus advises him to take it easy and come away from the window.

Summary

The titles of four of Keillor’s first books and the order of their publication served as a summary statement of the first part of his career. In Happy to Be Here, a major comedic talent appeared on the literary scene. Lake Wobegon Days showcased his powers of invention and his impressive prose style in a sustained narrative. Leaving Home announced that the author’s Lake Wobegon period was coming an end. In We Are Still Married, Keillor’s center of consciousness was no longer located in the Midwest, but had shifted to New York City. Perhaps the title was both a plea and a pledge to the readers who loved Lake Wobegon so much. Indeed, they loved it so much that, in time, the author returned to Minnesota and brought, as Wobegon Boy and Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 reveal, his old subject matter with him.

Bibliography

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