''Lake Wobegon Days'' is a novel by Garrison Keillor, first published in hardcover by

Viking Vikings ; non, víkingr is the modern name given to seafaring people originally from Scandinavia (present-day Denmark, Norway and Sweden), who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded and se ...

in 1985. Based on material from his radio show '' A Prairie Home Companion'', the book brought Keillor's work to a much wider audience and achieved international success selling over 1 million copies. Like some of Keillor's other books, it is unusual in that it could be said that the

audiobook An audiobook (or a talking book) is a recording of a book or other work being read out loud. A reading of the complete text is described as "unabridged", while readings of shorter versions are abridgements. Spoken audio has been available in sc ...

preceded the publication in written form. The work is a humorous account of life in fictitious

Lake Wobegon Lake Wobegon is a fictional town created by Garrison Keillor as the setting of the recurring segment "News from Lake Wobegon" for the radio program ''A Prairie Home Companion'' broadcast from St Paul, Minnesota. The fictional town serves as the s ...

Minnesota Minnesota () is a state in the upper midwestern region of the United States. It is the 12th largest U.S. state in area and the 22nd most populous, with over 5.75 million residents. Minnesota is home to western prairies, now given over to ...

, a heartland small town. Its early chapters are written in the form and style of a history of the town and later ones chronicle the lives, concerns, and activities of its inhabitants, with inter-generational tensions and relationships forming a major theme. Most of the latter material was originally delivered on radio in the form of monologues. Due to the nature of the original material, the second half of the novel has many recurring characters but little in the way of plot, resembling an incompletely integrated group of short stories.

Reception

In his

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the U ...

review

Richard Eder Richard Gray Eder (August 16, 1932 – November 21, 2014) was an American film reviewer and a drama critic. Life and career For 20 years, he was variously a foreign correspondent, a film reviewer and the drama critic for ''The New York Times''. ...

describes the book as being "filled with good things, but it has its problems." Eder goes on to say that "It is a pastiche, and a very talented one; but there are times when the whimsy frays." Barth Healey however, describes it as "a genuine work of American history" in his New York Times Book Review.

Reception

References

Further reading

Book reviews

External links