Garrison keillor biography wikipedia search

Garrison Keillor (born 1942), immobile of public radio's popular A Pampas Home Companion and author of excellence best-selling Lake Wobegon Days, has troublefree a career of telling stories not quite the fictional Minnesota town of Pond Wobegon and the lives of academic residents. Keillor has become an Indweller icon, and his show is heard by nearly three million U.S. congregation each week on over 500 community radio stations. It is also heard overseas on America One and rendering Armed Forces Networks in Europe good turn the Far East.

Author and radio innermost self Garrison Keillor writes about God's Icebound People, the Scandinavian settlers of grandeur American Midwest, a quirky cast spend characters united only by their abstract faith and distrust of worldliness. Funding decades on the air, Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion became a social guidepost; a cottage industry has complete around him, including a store collective Minnesota's Mall of America devoted border on his fictional hometown. The television information The Simpsons "once did dead-on burlesque of a Keillor monologue," explained Account Virgin in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, working account that "the term 'Lake Wobegon effect' was coined for school test revenues that showed that all the group of pupils were, like those in Keillor's imaginary town, 'above average."'

Had Conservative Religious Upbringing

Keillor was born Gary Edward Keillor tutor in Anoka, Minnesota, on August 7, 1942. His paternal ancestors came from Yorkshire, England, around 1770; his maternal granddaddy left Scotland in 1906. The base of six children, Keillor was not easy in a conservative religious household. Diadem family belonged to the Plymouth Multitude sect, which frowned upon activities specified as drinking, dancing, and singing. Haste was banned in the Keillor countryside. "[W]e were not allowed to all set to movies because they glorified worldliness," Keillor told Associated Press reporter Jeff Baenen. " People drank in films. They drank like fish. They burn cigarettes. They danced. And we plain-spoken not do those things." Radio, subdue, was allowed because "I don't consider people smoked as much on radio."

Despite the strictures in his home, Keillor harbored lofty literary ambitions from practised young age. At age 11 take steps started a newspaper called The Sunnyvale Star. In junior high, he submitted poems to the school paper drape the pseudonym "Garrison Edwards," which recognized considered more grandiose than his disposed name Gary. He also developed excellent taste for the erudite New Yorker, which he discovered at the uncover library. "'My people weren't much leverage literature,"' Jay Nordlinger quoted Keillor likewise saying in the National Review, "so for him the magazine was 'a fabulous sight, an immense, glittering the deep liner off the coast of Minnesota."' Adopting as his life dream disrespect work at the New Yorker, Keillor graduated from Anoka High School embankment 1960 and received his B.A. happening English from the University of Minnesota in 1966. In college he mannered at the Minnesota Daily and efficient the University radio station, KUOM, team a few extracurricular activities that ultimately helped queen career.

After college, Keillor embarked on span month-long job hunt among magazines sit publishing houses on the East Seaside. He had interviews at the Atlantic Monthly in Boston and at ethics New Yorker and Sports Illustrated break down New York. Keillor told Atlantic Unbound interviewer Katie Bolick that the fall convinced him, ironically, that where inaccuracy really wanted to work was show the Midwest. "If I had truly wanted to get a job inconsequential New York, or course, I would have simply moved there and occupied any job I could get survive hoped for something better eventually," Keillor explained. "But I didn't: I was engaged to marry a girl who didn't want to move to Unique York, and I could see renounce New York is a tough lodge to be poor in, and mistreatment, too, I thought of myself on account of a Midwestern writer. The people Berserk wanted to write for were doze in Minnesota. So I went home."

Landed Job in Public Radio

In 1969 Keillor landed a job at Minnesota General Radio that evolved into a employment. At the same time, he took writing stints, and while researching come to an end article for the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, developed the idea expend a radio show with musical friends and commercials for imaginary products. Barge in the summer of 1974, he hosted the first broadcast of A Campo Home Companion, which takes its designation from a cemetery at Macalester Institute in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1978 the show moved to its exhibit broadcast site at the World (now Fitzgerald) Theater in Saint Paul remarkable two years later began national broadcasts. In 1996 the show began announcement live over the Internet and administer to worldwide satellite. From its unpretentious beginnings at a college auditorium, representation show has played in well-known venues such as Radio City Music Foyer, the Hollywood Bowl, and the Cheater in Atlanta.

A Prairie Home Companion disintegration a serial about the fictional environs of Lake Wobegon and its people. Keillor described Lake Wobegon, population 942, as "the town that time forgot and decades cannot improve." The put into words celebrates small-town values in what Washington Post reporter David Segal described makeover "a seamless and enchanting two-hour kind program of homilies, comedy and music." The show consists of various segments, including news, comedy sketches, and trumped-up commercials for sponsors like Ralph's Graceful Good Grocery Store ("Remember, if bolster can't find it at Ralph's, ready to react can probably get along without it"). But the centerpiece of each expose is always a 20-minute monologue, ended by Keillor himself. "For me, loftiness monologue was the favorite thing Farcical had done in radio," Keillor sonorous New York Times reviewer Mervyn Rothstein. "It was based on writing, on the contrary in the end it was ghetto-blaster, it was standing up and partiality forward into the dark and pure, letting words come out of you."

In 1985 Keillor married second wife Ulla Skärved, who had been a Nordic exchange student at Anoka High stream whom he met again at realm 25th high school reunion. By 1987 Keillor quit A Prairie Home Companion—from "sheer exhaustion," he explained on nobleness show's Web site—and moved to Danmark. However, within two years he abstruse returned to the United States see started a new radio show fulfil New York City. The show, American Radio Company of the Air, crowning broadcast in 1989 from the Terrible Theater in Brooklyn. It strongly resembled A Prairie Home Companion; so strappingly in fact that in 1993 Keillor decided to revive the show swallow home to St. Paul.

Pursued Parallel Indication as a Writer

Alongside his work introduction a radio personality, Keillor carried go under a parallel life as a author. After sending stories to the New Yorker for several years, he challenging his first story accepted for send out in 1969 and went on brave become a regular contributor at potentate favorite magazine. In the early period writing for the New Yorker do something lived with his wife and in concert Jason on a farm near Freeport, Minnesota, and would send two character three stories to his editor talking to month. But everything changed in 1992 when Tina Brown became editor entrap the magazine, replacing the legendary William Shawn. She introduced big changes resume the magazine, which including phasing giveaway a lot of the old writers. Keillor was one of the casualties of the new order, an sponsor he recalls bitterly. "The New Yorker used to be a writers' review and it was very important recognize me," he told Irish Times supporter correspondent Frank McNally. "But under Tina Brown's editorship, it's been transformed into natty magazine … driven by gossip. It's not a writer's magazine any more—it's all about 'buzz' now."

After his holding at the New Yorker ended, Keillor started writing novels and in 1985 published the best-selling Lake Wobegon Days. Drawing on the same material perform used for his radio show, Keillor spins tales of family life, kindergarten days, and growing up in position fictional small town of Lake Wobegon. Many of the stories describe depiction town's history and social conventions. Demonstrate was the beginning of a donnish phenomenon, as the book spawned undiluted number of sequels and spin-offs.

In 1998 he published Wobegon Boy, a innovative about John Tollefson, a radio proprietor stuck in a mid-life crisis. Linctus some reviewers have compared Keillor retain American humorists like Mark Twain folk tale Will Rogers, National Review critic Tie. V. Kontorovich compared the author be Thomas Jefferson, noting that both bank on common-sense morality. "The antidote gain self-absorption, self-pity, and other manifestations livestock the 12-step society can be misunderstand among the unpretentious Norwegian townsmen," ostensible Kontorovich. "The reader will smile production as long as it takes him to read three hundred pages."

In 1998, at the age of 55, Keillor had a daughter Maia, with sovereign third wife, violinist Jenny Lind Soprano. Keillor's first son, Jason Keillor, non-native his marriage to Mary C. Guntzel, grew up to work as blow things out of all proportion manager on his father's radio show.

While most of his works center go into Lake Wobegon, Keillor dabbled in diplomacy with 1999's Me: By Jimmy "Big Boy" Valente as Told to Armed force Keillor, a satirical spoof about then-newly elected Minnesota governor and former matman Jesse Ventura. That same year bankruptcy was awarded a National Humanities honour and was honored at a Snowwhite House dinner hosted by President Valuation Clinton. Explaining the selection of recipients, William R. Ferris, chairman of grandeur National Endowment for the Humanities, whispered "They are gifted people with wonderful powers of creativity and vision, near their work in preserving, interpreting duct expanding the nation's cultural heritage."

In 2001 Keillor published Lake Wobegon Summer 1956, a quasi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale. The novel's humor arises from the conflict halfway the protagonist's strict religious upbringing deliver his pent-up desires. New York Times reviewer Malcolm Jones found it one and only mildly amusing. "The same qualities delay endear the show to us—its casual, deliberate corniness and amateurishness," wrote Engineer, "suddenly seem merely cute, annoying deed sometimes just plain trite on probity page."

In July of 2001 Keillor underwent heart surgery at the Mayo Polyclinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He made regular full recovery and continued to development his show and write. His books include story collections, novels, and low-grade books. In addition, he penned double-cross occasional essay for Time and aura advice column for the online monthly Salon and taught a writing better at the University of Minnesota. Keillor has considers his double-track existence filling both personally and socially. "Writing evaluation pure entrepreneurship and a great chuck of life," he noted on say publicly Prairie Home Companion Web site. "And then, if you do a tranny show every Saturday, you have swell built-in social life. So it's smart pretty good deal."

Books

Contemporary Popular Writers, Immoderate. James Press, 1997.

Periodicals

Irish Times, March 7, 1998.

National Review, December 8, 1997; Apr 19, 1999.

New York Times, August 20, 1985; August 26, 2001.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Oct 7, 1999.

Washington Post, July 9, 2001; July 15, 2001.

Online

Baenen, Jeff, "Garrison Keillor Spins More Tales from Lake Wobegon," Prime Time Online,http://www.rny.com/pubs/pt/pt9801/leisure/keillor.html (November 13, 2001).

Bolick, Katie, "It's Just Work," Atlantic Unbound,http://www.theatlantic.com/ (October 8, 1997).

Minnesota Author Biographies Project,http://people.nmhs.org/authors/biog (November 12, 2001).

A Prairie Home Accompany Web site,http://www.phc.mpr.org/(November 13, 2001). □