Garrison Keillor |
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Garrison Keillor,
'America's tallest radio humorist', was born
in 1942 in a small town in Minnesota, into a
family of Scottish fundamental protestants.
His father was a railroad clerk and he was the
third of six children. As a child, radio and
television were discouraged, but the family
were expert at entertaining themselves with
evenings of storytelling.
In 1966 Garrison Keillor graduated from the
University of Minnesota, where he earned his
tuition working at the campus radio station.
His ambition though was to write - three years
later the big breakthrough came when he sold a
story to the New Yorker. He immediately gave
up his job at the radio station to concentrate
exclusively on writing but, ironically, it was
an assignment from the New Yorker in 1974,
which tempted him back to the radio.
Writing about the Grand Ole Opry in
Nashville brought back childhood memories of
the warmth and spontaneity of the medium, and
the result of this was to be Keillor's
immensely popular live radio show, 'A Prairie
Home Companion'. The first show, broadcast in
1974, had fewer spectators in the audience
than performers, but by 1987 it had become a
phenomenal success and was being broadcast
nationwide by satellite.
Lake Wobegon Days, which was derived
from these monologues, became a bestseller in
the United States - and was to repeat this
success when Faber published it in the UK in
February 1986. It went straight onto the
Sunday Times bestseller list at number one and
remained on the list for over twenty weeks: a
unique achievement for a little-known American
author.
Garrison Keillor is the author of numerous
other books published by Faber, including two
books for children - The Man Who Ate Cheese
and Cat, You Better Come
Home. In 2001 he returned to Lake Wobegon
with the novel Lake Wobegon Summer 1956
and a book of photographs, In Search of
Lake Wobegon.
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