Leaving Home

New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1987. BOOK: Corners Bumped; Light Shelf Rub to Boards; Spine Slightly Cocked; Edges Lightly Soiled. DUST JACKET: Previous Owner Markings (Price Clipped); Lightly Creased; Slight Yellowing Due to Age; In Archival Quality Jacket Cover. A Collection of Lake Wobegon Stories. ALSO KNOWN AS: All of these stories were performed, in slightly different form, on "A Prairie Home Companion," a production of Minnesota Public Radio. The mouse episode in "New Year's" was taken from an account by Joe O'Connell, and the bus story in "Aprille" came from my wife, Ulla Skaerved. - G. K. "A Trip to Grand Rapids," "The Killer," and "Chicken" first appeared in The Atlantic. PHOTOGRAPH BY: Thomas Frederick Arndt. CONTENTS: Introduction: A Letter from Copenhagen; A Trip to Grand Rapids; A Ten-Dollar Bill; Easter; Corinne; A Glass of Wendy; The Speeding Ticket; Seeds; Chicken; How the Crab Apple Grew; Truckstop; Dale; High Rise; Collection; Life Is Good; Lyle's Roof; Pontoon Boat; State Fair; David and Agnes, a Romance; The Killer; Eloise; The Royal Family; Homecoming; Brethren; Thanksgiving; Darlene Makes a Move; Christmas Dinner; Exiles; New Year's; Where Did It Go Wrong?; Post Office; Out in the Cold; Hawaii; Hansel; Du, Du Liegst Mir im Herzen; Aprille; Goodbye to the Lake. SYNOPSIS: Almost every Saturday night for the past thirteen years Garrison Keillor has drawn listeners to "A Prairie Home Companion" into the beguiling comic world of Lake Wobegon, the quintessential American small town - "The town that time forgot, that the decades cannot improve." In this, the first collection of Lake Wobegon monologues, Garrison Keillor tells us more about some of the people he introduced in print in Lake Wobegon Days, and about some others, many of whom are leaving home. Among them are Darlene, quitting her job at the Chatterbox Café after thirteen years ("Oh honey," her mother said, "why don't you do something with yourself?"); Dale Uecker, Rollie Hochstetter's grandson, who forsakes Carla Krebsbach to join the Navy ("It's a wonderful thing to push on alone toward the horizon and have it be your own horizon and not someone else's"); and Father Emil, retiring from Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility after forty-four years. There are stories here about parents who left: about Val Tollefson's father, David, who fell passionately in love with a neighbor's wife ("Dear Agnes, Something has taken hold of my heart . . . "), and ran away with her in 1946; and Alex Campbell, who deserted his family in 1948, consigning Grace and her three children to life in a green mobile home dependent upon the charity of her family and the Church. The perils of taking vacations, of parents coming home to witness (or not quite) the adventures their offspring have indulged in, are here too: the shooting accident in Daryl's parents' bedroom, or the party the Hedlund girls hold when Roger and Cindy take a trip to Grand Rapids. And there are those who talk a lot about leaving: "The Herdsmen" from Lake Wobegon Lutheran deliberating about the National Church Ushers Convention in Honolulu ("You've got to have a good reason to go to Hawaii . . . My people aren't paradise people"); or Myrtle Krebsbach, who fails to persuade Florian that life in a Senior Citizen high rise in Saint Cloud would be far superior to life in Lake Wobegon. But most of the townspeople stay put, experiencing those small epiphanies in life that Garrison Keillor captures so perfectly - a daughter sharing wonderful news with her father in the kitchen; two women dancing together, glimpsed through a window on a fall night; and a man and wife lying in a warm winter bed, their arms around one another. This collection of thirty-six stories is Garrison Keillor's farewell tribute to life in Lake Wobegon - "Where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." Garrison Keillor was born in Anoka, Minnesota, in 1942 and graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1966. He is married to Ulla Skaerved, and they have four children. From 1974 to 1987 he was the host of the live radio show "A Prairie Home Companion," a recipient of a Peabody and an Edward R. Murrow Award. He is the author of two best-selling books, Happy to Be Here (1982) and Lake Wobegon Days (1985). He has contributed for many years to The New Yorker and other magazines.. First Edition 1st Printing. Hard Cover. Very Good/Very Good. Illus. by Peter Thorpe. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.