SOURCE: "The Distance Between Gopher Prairie and Lake Wobegon: Sinclair Lewis and Garrison Keillor on the Small Town Experience," in Centenniel Review, Vol. 31, Fall, 1987, pp. 432-46.

In the following essay, Miller compares and contrasts Keillor's and Sinclair Lewis's portrayal of small-town life.

When Garrison Keillor took stories and characters which he's been developing for a decade on his radio program, "Prairie Home Companion," and expanded and reworked them into a book, the resulting Lake Wobegon Days quickly shot up to the top of the best seller lists and earned the tall (6′4″), lanky Minnesota humorist cover stories in such publications as Time, Saturday Evening Post, and The New York Times Book Review. Like another tall, skinny writer who came from a town just up the road a ways, Keillor has become an unmistakable presence on the American scene. At age thirty-five, Sinclair Lewis was eight years younger than Keillor...