Storyteller Garrison Keillor to perform solo show

Writer and radio show host Garrison Keillor will perform Wednesday at the City Auditorium.

Best known for his popular live radio variety show “A Prairie Home Companion,” the Minnesota-born Keillor will appear solo for an evening of storytelling, according to a news release.

Keillor got his start in radio at the University of Minnesota before beginning his career at Minnesota Public Radio in 1969. He began hosting “A Prairie Home Companion” at the Janet Wallace Auditorium at Macalester College in Saint Paul in July 1974 for an audience of about a dozen people. The live show was produced about 500 times in its first decade before moving to a new home, the World Theater.

After a brief hiatus in 1987, the show returned as “American Radio Company of the Air,” based in New York City, before moving back to its home state and name in 1992, according to the show’s website.

“A Prairie Home Companion” has been broadcast to almost every state as well as Canada, Ireland, Scotland, England, Germany and Iceland to an audience that had grown to 4 million listeners on 600 stations before Keillor handed over the show’s reins to Chris Thile last summer.

Keillor is the best-selling author of more than two dozen books, including “Lake Wobegon Days,” “Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny,” “Life Among the Lutherans,” “Pilgrims,” “Homegrown Democrat” and “The Keillor Reader.” The first collection of poems written by Keillor, “O, What a Luxury: Verses Lyrical, Vulgar, Pathetic & Profound” was published in 2013, and he has served as editor of collections such as “77 Love Sonnets” and “Good Poems: American Places.”

He wrote the screenplay and starred as himself in the film adaptation of “A Prairie Home Companion” in 2006.

Today, Keillor hosts the daily radio and online program “The Writers Almanac” and publishes weekly syndicated newspaper columns in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune.

Keillor has won Grammy, ACE and George Foster Peabody awards, received the National Humanities Medal and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In addition to performing solo shows, he owns an independent bookstore, Common Good Books, in Saint Paul.

This story was originally published May 4, 2017 at 6:52 AM with the headline "Storyteller Garrison Keillor to perform solo show."