Garrison Keillor
A prolific writer, Garrison Keillor is a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines throughout the United States and abroad. To the right, you find a selection of articles published since 1989, and a few unpublished pieces.
The Old Scout
Ongoing
For more than 30 years, Americans of every political stripe have tuned in to Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion to be entertained by his wise, low-key reflections. Keillor’s trademark good humor and sharp insights will be on display every week in a fresh newspaper column. He’ll engage readers with his progressive views on the social and political issues, large and small, facing the country and the world.
77 Love Sonnets
June 2009
When I was 16, Helen Fleischman assigned me to memorize Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. 29, ‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state’ for English class, and fifty years later, that poem is still in my head. Algebra got washed away, and geometry and most of biology, but those lines about the redemptive power of love in the face of shame are still here behind my eyeballs, more permanent than my own teeth. The sonnet is a durable good. These 77 of mine include sonnets of praise, some erotic, some lamentations, some street sonnets and a 12-sonnet cycle of months. If anything here offends, I beg your pardon, I come in peace, I depart in gratitude.
Liberty
September 9, 2008
Liberty is about Clint Bunsen’s crisis of faith when he feels that his life in Lake Wobegon is a big mistake and all his work to make the Fourth of July amazing and spectacular is for naught, that the town despises achievement and that he should head for California. He falls in love with a young psychic who marches in the parade as the Statue of Liberty, hence the title. But his wife Irene is stalwart and is not ready to lose him so easily. And there lies the story.
Pontoon
September 11, 2007
In Lake Wobegon lives a good Lutheran lady who is quite prepared to die and wishes to be cremated and her ashes placed inside a bowling ball and dropped into the lake, no prayers, no hymns, thank you very much. Meanwhile, the Detmer girl returns from California where she has made a killing in veterinary aromatherapy to marry her boyfriend Brent aboard Wally’s pontoon boat, presided over by her minister, Misty Naylor of the Sisterhood of the Sacred Spirit. Brent arrives on Thursday. On Saturday, a delegation of renegade Lutheran pastors from Denmark come to town on their tour of America, their punishment for having denied the divinity of Jesus. And Barbara Peterson, whose mother, Evelyn, left the startling note about cremation and the bowling ball, is in love with a lovely fat man who slips around town in the dim light and reconnoiters with her at the Romeo Motel.
Read the first chapter >>
Reviews and more >>
Order now! >>
“Homegrown Democrat,” Chapters 1-4
August 10, 2004
Garrison Keillor’s latest book, “Homegrown Democrat,” was released on July 15, 2004. Here he offers the first four chapters for your perusal, courtesy of Viking Books. Dedicating the book to “all of the good Democratic-Farmer-Laborites of Minnesota,” he offers “a few plain thoughts from the heart of America.”
From the book jacket:
In a book that is at once deeply personal and intellectually savvy, “Homegrown Democrat” is a celebration of liberalism as the “politics of kindness.” In his inimitable style, Keillor draws on a lifetime of experience amongst the hardworking, God-fearing people of the Midwest and pays homage to the common code of civic necessities that arose from the left:
- Protect the social compact.
- Defend the powerless.
- Maintain government as a necessary force for good.
As Keillor tells it, these are articles of faith that are being attacked by hard-ass Republican tax cutters who believe that human misery is a Dickensian fiction. In a blend of nostalgic reminiscence, humorous meditation, and articulate ire, Keillor asserts the values of his boyhood—the values of Lake Wobegon—that do not square with the ugly narcissistic agenda at work in the country today.
A thoughtful, wonderfully written book, “Homegrown Democrat” is Keillor’s love letter to liberalism, the older generation, John F. Kennedy, the University of Minnesota, and the yellow-dog Democrat city of St. Paul that is sure to amuse and inspire Americans just when they need it most.
