Garrison Keillor

Early life

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 who was half-Canadian with English ancestry; Keillor's paternal grandfather was from Kingston, Ontario. His maternal grandparents were Scottish immigrants from Glasgow.

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 Joseph 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.

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, MER 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. Today the show is 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 presents parodic serial melodramas, such as The Adventures of Guy Noir, Private Eye and The Lives of the Cowboys. Keillor voices Noir, the cowboy Lefty, and other recurring characters, and provides lead or backup vocals for some of the show's musical numbers. The show airs from the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul.

After the show's intermission, Keillor reads 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 delivers a monologue called The News from Lake Wobegon, a fictitious town based in parts on Keillor's own 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 "... where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average."

The original PHC ran until 1987, when Keillor ended it to focus on other projects. In 1989, he launched a new live radio program from New York City, The American Radio Company of the Air, which had essentially the same format as PHC. In 1992, he moved ARC back to St. Paul, and a year later changed the name back to A Prairie Home Companion; it has remained a fixture of Saturday night radio broadcasting ever since.

On a typical broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion, Keillor’s name is not mentioned unless a guest addresses him by name, although some sketches feature Keillor as his alter ego, Carson Wyler. In the closing credits, which Keillor reads, he gives himself no billing or credit except "written by Sarah Bellum," a joking reference to his own brain.

Keillor regularly takes the radio company on the road to broadcast from popular venues around the United States; the touring production typically features local celebrities and skits incorporating local color. In April 2000, he took the program to Edinburgh, Scotland, producing two performances in the city's Queen's Hall, which were broadcast by BBC Radio. He toured Scotland with the program to celebrate its 25th anniversary. (In the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, the program is known as Garrison Keillor's Radio Show.) Keillor has produced broadcast performances similar to PHC but without the "Prairie Home Companion" brand, as in his 2008 appearance at the Oregon Bach Festival. He is also the host of The Writer's Almanac, which, like PHC, is produced and distributed by American Public Media.

In a March 2011 interview, Keillor announced that he would be retiring from A Prairie Home Companion in 2013; but in a December 2011 interview with the Sioux City Journal, Keillor said: "The show is going well. I love doing it. Why quit?" During an interview on July 20, 2015, Keillor announced his intent to retire from the show after the 2015–2016 season, saying, "I have a lot of other things that I want to do. I mean, nobody retires anymore. Writers never retire. But this is my last season. This tour this summer is the farewell tour."

Keillor's final episode of the show was recorded live for an audience of 18,000 fans at the Hollywood Bowl in California on July 1, 2016, and broadcast the next day, ending 42 seasons of the show. After the performance, President Obama phoned Keillor to congratulate him. The show continued on October 15, 2016 with Chris Thile as its host.

Writing

At age thirteen, 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."

Keillor wrote the screenplay for the 2006 movie A Prairie Home Companion, directed by Robert Altman. He also appears in the movie.

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. Upon opening the bookstore, Keillor wrote this poem:

In April 2012, the store moved to a new location on Snelling Avenue across from Macalester College in the Macalester-Groveland neighborhood.

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:

Music

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

Controversies

In 2005, Keillor's attorneys sent a cease-and-desist letter to MNSpeak.com regarding their production of a T-shirt bearing the phrase "A Prairie Ho Companion."

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 Mr. Keillor arrived at the church, declined an introduction and took the stage without an opportunity to mingle with the audience, and so 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. Supposedly, before Keillor's remarks, participants in the event had considered the visit to have been cordial and warm. Asked to respond, Keillor stuck to his story, describing the people who advised him not to discuss politics and saying that he did not have security guards at other stops on the tour.

In 2007, Keillor wrote a column that in part criticized "stereotypical" gay parents, who he said were "sardonic fellows with fussy hair who live in over-decorated apartments with a striped sofa and a small weird dog and who worship campy performers." In response to the strong reactions of many readers, Keillor said:

In 2008, Keillor created a controversy in St. Paul when he filed a lawsuit against his neighbor's plan to build an addition on their home, citing his need for "light and air" and a view of "open space and beyond." Keillor's home is significantly larger than others in his neighborhood and would still be significantly larger than his neighbor's with its planned addition. Keillor came to an undisclosed settlement with his neighbor shortly after the story became public.

In 2009, one of Keillor's "Old Scout" columns contained a reference to "lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys" and a complaint about "Silent Night" as rewritten by Unitarians, upsetting some readers. A Unitarian minister named Cynthia Landrum responded, "Listening to him talk about us over the years, it's becoming more and more evident that he isn't laughing with us — he's laughing at us," while Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe called Keillor "cranky and intolerant."

Praise and criticism

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."

Personal life

Keillor is a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. He is 6 ft 3 in (1.90 m) tall. He considers himself a loner and prefers not to make eye contact with people. Though not 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, Jason (born 1969). Keillor married Ulla Skaerved, a former exchange student from Denmark at Keillor's high school whom he re-encountered at a class reunion, from 1985 to 1990. He married violist Jenny Lind Nilsson (born 1957), who is also from Anoka, in 1995. They have one daughter, Maia Grace Keillor (born December 29, 1997).

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 popular culture

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

Awards and other recognition