• To Mary Guntzel, from 1965 to 1976. The couple has one son, Jason, born in 1969.
• To Ulla Skaerved (a former exchange student from Denmark at Keillor's high school whom he famously reencountered at a class reunion), from 1985 to 1990.
• To violinist Jenny Lind Nilsson (b. 1957), who is from his hometown of Anoka, since 1995. They have one daughter, Maia, born in December 1997.

Ancestors

Radio

Writing

Illness offers the chance to think long thoughts about the future (praying that we yet have one, dear God), and so I have, and so this is the last column of Mr. Blue, under my authorship, for Salon. Over the years, Mr. Blue's strongest advice has come down on the side of freedom in our personal lives, freedom from crushing obligation and overwork and family expectations and the freedom to walk our own walk and be who we are. And some of the best letters have been addressed to younger readers trapped in jobs like steel suits, advising them to bust loose and go off and have an adventure. Some of the advisees have written back to inform Mr. Blue that the advice was taken and that the adventure changed their lives. This was gratifying.

So now I am simply taking my own advice. Cut back on obligations: Promote a certain elegant looseness in life. Simple as that. Winter and spring, I almost capsized from work, and in the summer I had a week in St. Mary's Hospital to sit and think, and that's the result. Every dog has his day and I've had mine and given whatever advice was mine to give (and a little more). It was exhilarating to get the chance to be useful, which is always an issue for a writer (What good does fiction do?), and Mr. Blue was a way to be useful. Nothing human is beneath a writer's attention; the basic questions about how to attract a lover and what to do with one once you get one and how to deal with disappointment in marriage are the stuff that fiction is made from, so why not try to speak directly? And so I did. And now it's time to move on.

Bookselling

• In 1994, Keillor was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame.
• "Welcome to Minnesota" markers in interstate rest areas near the state's borders include statements such as "Like its neighbors, the thirty-second state grew as a collection of small farm communities, many settled by immigrants from Scandinavia and Germany. Two of the nation's favorite fictional small towns -- Sinclair Lewis's Gopher Prairie and Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon -- reflect that heritage." Welcome to Minnesota - Minnesota Historical Markers on Waymarking.com
• In 2007, The Moth, a NYC-based not-for-profit storytelling organization, awarded Garrison Keillor with the first The Moth Award - Honoring the Art of the Raconteur at the annual Moth Ball. The Moth - Annual Moth Ball
• In September 2007, Keillor was awarded the 2007 John Steinbeck Award, given to artists who capture "the spirit of Steinbeck's empathy, commitment to democratic values, and belief in the dignity of the common man."

I live in a small world -- the world of entertainment, musicians, writers -- in which gayness is as common as having brown eyes.... And in that small world, we talk openly and we kid each other a lot. But in the larger world, gayness is controversial...and so gay people feel besieged to some degree and rightly so.... My column spoke as we would speak in my small world and it was read by people in the larger world and thus the misunderstanding.

• Voiceover artist for Honda UK's "the Power of Dreams" campaign. The campaign's most memorable advertisement is the 2003 Honda Accord commercial Cog, which features a Rube Goldberg Machine (W. Heath Robinson for those in the UK) made entirely of car parts. The commercial ends with Keillor asking, "Isn't it nice when things just work?" Since then, Keillor has voiced the tagline for most if not all Honda UK advertisements, and even sang the voiceover in the 2004 Honda Diesel commercial "Grrr". His most recent ad was a reworking of an existing commercial with digitally added England flags to tie in with the World Cup. Keillor's tagline was "Come on, England, keep the dream alive."
• Voice of the Norse god Odin in an episode of the Disney animated series "Hercules".
• Voice of Walt Whitman and other historical figures in Ken Burns's documentary series The Civil War and Baseball.

Lake Wobegon

• Lake Wobegon Days (1985), ISBN 0-14-013161-2; a recorded version of this won a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word or Non-musical Album in 1988
• Leaving Home (1987; collection of Lake Wobegon stories), ISBN 0-670-81976-X
• We Are Still Married (1989; collection including some Lake Wobegon stories), ISBN 0-670-82647-2
• Wobegon Boy (1997), ISBN 0-670-87807-3
• Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 (2001), ISBN 0-571-21014-7
• In Search of Lake Wobegon (Photographs by Richard Olsenius, 2001), ISBN 0-670-03057-6
• A Novel of Lake Wobegon (2007), ISBN 0-670-06356-8
• A Novel of Lake Wobegon (2008), ISBN 0-670-01991-7
• Life among the Lutherans (2009), ISBN 978-0-8066-7061-4
• A Wobegon Romance (2009), ISBN 978-0-670-02109-3

Other

• Happy to be Here (1981), ISBN 0-06-811201-7
• A Radio Romance, (1991), ISBN 0-670-81857-7
• A Visit to Mark Twain's House audio (1992), ISBN 0-942110-82-X
• The Book of Guys (1993), ISBN 0-670-84943-X
• The Sandy Bottom Orchestra (with Jenny Lind Nilsson, 1996), ISBN 0-7868-1250-8
• Me, by Jimmy "Big Boy" Valente (1999), ISBN 0-670-88796-X
• Good Poems (2002), ISBN 0-670-03126-7
• Love Me (2003), ISBN 0-670-03246-8
• Homegrown Democrat (2004), ISBN 0-670-03365-0
• Good Poems for Hard Times (2005), ISBN 0-670-03436-3
• 77 Love Sonnets (2009), ISBN 0-14-311527-8
• A Christmas Blizzard (2009), ISBN 978-0-670-02136-9

Contributions to The New Yorker