In 1985 Time magazine ran on its cover Garrison Keillor's face
superimposed across the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota,
taking the publication of Keillor's book of the same name as an
occasion to raise some hoopla over this "radio bard" (he was then
host of the highly acclaimed "A Prairie Home Companion" variety
show) and humorist nonpareil. Not since Will Rogers has a
crackerbarrel philosopher become a national figure, a celebrity.
And it is the rare down-home fellow from the prairies ("radio's
tallest shy person") who also happens to write for the New Yorker.
In this lucid, well-researched study Peter A. Scholl follows
chronologically the dual career of Garrison Keillor, the pen name
Gary Edward Keillor has been using since he was 13, exploring the
Minnesotan's double mastery of the arts of storytelling and
writing. Scholl looks at how Keillor's writing and conceptions for
radio - particularly the News from Lake Wobegon on "A Prairie Home
Companion" - has influenced his writing. Keillor's humorous
sketches and stories have appeared in the New Yorker since 1970 (he
was on its staff from 1987 to 1992); his books - Happy to Be Here
(1982), Lake Wobegon Days (1985), We Are Still Married (1989),
Leaving Home (1987), and WLT: A Radio Romance (1991) - have met
critical and popular success. Scholl finds that if Keillor attained
his widest acclaim as a yarnspinner in the nineteenth-century
traditions of local color and literary comedy - the foremost
progenitor of which being Mark Twain - he revitalized those
traditions while adopting comic modes and playing roles that had
little precedent in eras other than his own. Keillor's being a New
Yorker writer has, according to Scholl, almost symmetrically
affected the structure and nuance of his oral tales: they represent
a cross-pollination between traditional oral storytelling and the
verbal artistry of not only the New Yorker writers the young
Keillor so admired - James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, A. J. Liebling,
and E. B. White - but also such experimentalist writers as Donald
Barthelme. Scholl in fact compares the darker side of Keillor's
humor with the postmodernism of Barthelme - and, perhaps at the
other end of the spectrum, he draws some parallels between
Keillor's tales and those of Jean Shepherd, whose fictional town of
Hohman, Indiana, has served him in the same way Lake Wobegon has
Keillor. In this engaging, balanced literary portrait, Scholl
analyzes how Keillor's public career as a radio performer has often
put him at odds with his more solitary life as a writer. At least
four times Keillor has quit his positions in radio to devote
himself more exclusively to writing, and this oscillation between
two callings, notes Scholl, reveals a complex ambivalence in
Keillor's career - an ambivalence that might just add to the
poignancy and uniqueness of the stories Keillor tells.
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