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Garrison Keillor (born Gary Edward Keillor on August 7, 1942) is an American author, humorist, columnist, musician, satirist, and radio personality.

He is best known as founder and host of the American Public Media show A Prairie Home Companion (also known as Garrison Keillor's Radio Show on BBC 7 and in Ireland). Keillor's trademark storyline is the weekly News from Lake Wobegon, a monologue about a fictional town (based on Anoka, Minnesota, Garrison's hometown or possibly Freeport, Minnesota, near the center of the state where Keillor lived for a short period of time), "where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average."

Keillor has also written many articles for The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Salon.com. Keillor is the host of The Writer's Almanac, a five-minute program which is broadcast daily on some public radio stations in the United States.

Biography

Keillor was born in Anoka, Minnesota, and raised in a family belonging to the Plymouth Brethren, a fundamentalist Christian denomination he has since left. He is six feet, four inches (1.93 m) tall and is of Norwegian and Scottish ancestry. Keillor is a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. He currently is an Episcopalian*, but has been a Lutheran; he often uses his religious roots in his material. He graduated from the University of Minnesota with a bachelor's degree in English in 1966. While there, he began his broadcasting career on the student-operated radio station, known today as Radio K.

Keillor is married to violinist Jenny Lind Nilsson; they have a daughter, Maia. His first wife was Mary Guntzel, with whom he had a son, Jason. His second wife was Ulla Skaerved.

Mr. Blue

He also authored an advice column on Salon.com, titled "Mr. Blue". Following a heart operation, he resigned on September 4, 2001 in an article entitled "Every dog has his day":

Illness offers the chance to think long thoughts about the future (praying that we yet have one, dear God), and so I have, and so this is the last column of Mr. Blue, under my authorship, for Salon.

Over the years, Mr. Blue's strongest advice has come down on the side of freedom in our personal lives, freedom from crushing obligation and overwork and family expectations and the freedom to walk our own walk and be who we are. And some of the best letters have been addressed to younger readers trapped in jobs like steel suits, advising them to bust loose and go off and have an adventure. Some of the advisees have written back to inform Mr. Blue that the advice was taken and that the adventure changed their lives. This was gratifying.

So now I am simply taking my own advice. Cut back on obligations: Promote a certain elegant looseness in life. Simple as that. Winter and spring, I almost capsized from work, and in the summer I had a week in St. Mary's Hospital to sit and think, and that's the result. Every dog has his day and I've had mine and given whatever advice was mine to give (and a little more). It was exhilarating to get the chance to be useful, which is always an issue for a writer (What good does fiction do?), and Mr. Blue was a way to be useful. Nothing human is beneath a writer's attention; the basic questions about how to attract a lover and what to do with one once you get one and how to deal with disappointment in marriage are the stuff that fiction is made from, so why not try to speak directly? And so I did. And now it's time to move on.

In June 2005, Keillor started a syndicated newspaper column, which Salon.com runs.

Keillor in popular culture

Garrison Keillor is the voiceover artist for Honda UK's "the Power of Dreams" campaign. The campaign's most memorable advert is the 2003 Honda Accord commercial entitled "Cog". The two minute television ad features a complex system of car parts that react with each other to create a chain reaction similar to a Rube Goldberg or Heath Robinson cartoon. The commercial ends with Keillor asking, "Isn't it nice when things just work?" *

Since then, Keillor has voiced the tagline for most if not all Honda UK adverts, and even sang the voiceover in the 2004 Honda Diesel commercial entitled "Grrr". His most recent advert was a reworking of an existing commercial with digitally added England flags to tie in with the World Cup. Keillor's tagline was "Come on England, keep the dream alive".

His laid back style is often the subject of parody. The Simpsons parodies Keillor in an episode where Homer is shown watching a Keillor-like monologist on television, and upon hitting the set, exclaiming "Stupid TV! Be more funny!", which has become one of The Simpsons' oft-quoted catchphrases. In practice, Keillor rarely reads his monologue directly from the script, but the monotonous intonation and style of dress caricature Keillor successfully. One Boston radio critic likens Keillor and his "down comforter voice" to "a hypnotist intoning, 'You are getting sleepy now'", while noting that Keillor does play to listeners' intelligence. [http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2005/07/17/air_waves_bostons_public_radio_scene_gets_interesting?mode=PF

In the UK, his commercials have been parodied especially his song (for Honda): "Hate something, Change something, Make something better" (clip available below).

Keillor was featured in the Streaming Venue Songs of the band They Might Be Giants, supposedly inspiring John Flansburgh and John Linnell with "Midwestern Pledge Drive Funk" songs he had written, like "When Doves Cry," "Powdermilk Biscuit Rain," and "Factory's A-Closin' in the Quaint Fictional Lutheran Town."

Bibliography

Keillor's work includes:

Quotes by Garrison Keillor

  • ''"I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it."
  • ''"I think the most un-American thing you can say is, 'You can't say that.'"
  • ''"Beauty isn't worth thinking about; what's important is your mind. You don't want a fifty-dollar haircut on a fifty-cent head."
  • "Be well, do good work, and keep in touch."
  • "A minister has to be able to read a clock. At noon, it's time to go home and turn up the pot roast and get the peas out of the freezer."
  • "Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose."
  • "God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny."
  • "It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn't hear the barbarians coming."
  • "Librarians, Dusty, possess a vast store of politeness. These are people who get asked regularly the dumbest questions on God's green earth. These people tolerate every kind of crank and eccentric and mouth-breather there is."
  • "Nothing you do for children is ever wasted. They seem not to notice us, hovering, averting our eyes, and they seldom offer thanks, but what we do for them is never wasted."
  • "One day Donald Trump will discover that he is owned by Lutheran Brotherhood and must renegotiate his debt load with a committee of silent Norwegians who don't understand why anyone would pay more than $120.00 for a suit."
  • "People will miss that it once meant something to be Southern or Midwestern. It doesn't mean much now, except for the climate. The question 'where are you from' doesn't lead to anything odd or interesting. They live somewhere near a Gap store, and what else do you need to know?"
  • "Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don't put kids under surveillance: it might frighten you. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely nearsighted gaze."

References

External links

1942 births | Advice columnists | American Public Media | American humorists | American radio personalities | American Episcopalians | Members of The American Academy of Arts and Letters | People from Minneapolis, Minnesota | Minnesota Public Radio | Norwegian-Americans | People from Minnesota | Living people | Minnesota writers

Garrison Keillor | Garrison Keillor

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Garrison Keillor".

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