Garrison Keillor

Garrison Keillor

Gary Edward “Garrison” Keillor, born August 7, 1942, in Anoka, Minnesota, is an American author, singer, humorist, voice actor, and radio personality. He became one of the best-known figures in American public radio through a style that mixed fiction, music, comic sketches, literary notes, and small-town observation. The third of six children, he grew up in a family with English and Scottish roots. His father, John Philip Keillor, was a carpenter and postal worker, and his mother was Grace Ruth Denham Keillor.

Keillor graduated from Anoka High School in 1960 and earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Minnesota in 1966. While in college, he began broadcasting on the student-run station now known as Radio K. His family belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, an Evangelical Christian movement he later left. In 2006, he said he was attending St. John the Evangelist Episcopal church in Saint Paul, after previously attending a Lutheran church in New York. His background in Minnesota towns, church life, literature, and radio all fed the plainspoken comic voice that became his signature.

His professional radio career began in November 1969 with Minnesota Educational Radio, later Minnesota Public Radio. He hosted a weekday drive-time program, A Prairie Home Entertainment, on KSJR FM at St. John’s University in Collegeville. The show’s mix of music differed sharply from the station’s usual classical programming. During this period, he also submitted fiction to The New Yorker, where his story “Local Family Keeps Son Happy” appeared in September 1970. In 1971, after a dispute over musical programming, he left the morning show for a time, then returned to a program called A Prairie Home Companion.

A Prairie Home Companion debuted as a live Saturday night variety show on July 6, 1974. It featured guest musicians, comic skits, elaborate live sound effects, spoof commercials, and recurring serials such as The Adventures of Guy Noir, Private Eye and The Lives of the Cowboys. Keillor voiced Guy Noir, the cowboy Lefty, and other characters, and he also sang lead or backup on some musical numbers. The show aired from the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul and became closely tied to his fictional Minnesota town, Lake Wobegon, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”

Lake Wobegon became the setting for many of Keillor’s books, including Lake Wobegon Days and Leaving Home: A Collection of Lake Wobegon Stories. The town was based in part on Anoka, Freeport, and other small towns in Stearns County, Minnesota, where he lived in the early 1970s. He also created The Writer’s Almanac, a five-minute daily radio and podcast program pairing poems he selected with notes on literary, historical, and scientific events from that date. A Prairie Home Companion ran in its original form until 1987, returned in a related form as The American Radio Company of the Air in 1989, and took back the A Prairie Home Companion name in 1993.

Keillor hosted A Prairie Home Companion from 1974 to 2016. In November 2017, Minnesota Public Radio cut business ties with him after an allegation of inappropriate behavior with a freelance writer for the show. Internal and external MPR investigations concluded that he had engaged in dozens of sexually inappropriate incidents over a period of years, including unwanted sexual touching. In April 2018, MPR and Keillor announced a settlement allowing the archives of A Prairie Home Companion and The Writer’s Almanac to be publicly available again. Soon after, he began publishing new episodes of The Writer’s Almanac on his website and continued to tour a stage version of A Prairie Home Companion, not broadcast by NPR or American Public Media.