Garrison Keillor: "And that's the news from Lake Wobegon..."
For more than four decades, A Prairie Home Companion has been what is called "appointment radio." About four million people in the U.S. and countless listeners around the globe have made of point of tuning in every week. It was conceived as a variety show with music, comedy, spoofs and storytelling. The stories were set in a fictitious "little town that time forgot," called Lake Wobegon.
There have been many other accolades, including a Peabody Award (the Oscars of radioland); induction into the National Radio Hall of Fame; even a feature film about the program with an A-list of Hollywood stars, directed by Robert Altman.
Mr. Keillor came up with the idea for A Prairie Home Companion after an assignment for The New Yorker magazine, where he was a staff writer for about two decades. The article was about the Grand Ole Opry, a weekly concert in Nashville, Tennessee that is also the longest-running radio broadcast in U.S. history.
A young musician named Chris Thile is now host of Prairie Home, but Garrison Keillor remains as the program's executive producer. He is also continuing with a daily public radio broadcast called The Writer's Almanac, which has been offering listeners a poem a day for more than twenty years.
As if that is not enough to keep him out of trouble, Mr. Keillor writes a weekly syndicated column that appears in The Washington Post. It's here that his fiercely gentle social commentary, continues to flourish. Garrison Keillor is the founder and owner of a store in St. Paul, Minnesota called Common Good Books; and he has authored or co-authored more than two dozen books: works of fiction, non-fiction and essays.