Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 by Garrison Keillor

It's 1956 and it's summertime in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. The Doo Dads are singing "My Girl" on the radio and on the porch of the big green house on Green Street, fourteen-year-old Gary is studying pictures of naked women, aware that Grandpa is looking down from the window of heaven and wondering how a Sanctified Brethren boy could turn out so badly. He has never so much as kissed a girl, except his rebellious cousin Kate, a sophisticate of seventeen who knows about The New Yorker and also how to swear and exhale smoke through her nose. He feels lost when she falls for a heroic southpaw pitcher named Roger Guppy. But this is the summer when things change. Gary comes into possession of an Underwood typewriter. He fights back against his bullying born-again sister and his tyrannical teacher. And he starts to become a writer, producing fantastic tales about talking dogs, fatal blood diseases, tornadoes, and the lady with the torch. In Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 Keillor is at his funny best. With his trademark gift for treading "a line delicate as a cobweb between satire and sentiment" (Cleveland Plain Dealer), he brilliantly captures a newly minted postwar America and delivers an unforgettable comedy about an unforgettable kid coming of age as a writer in the rural Midwest. In Gary we recognize the hardest and the best aspects of youth, the fascination and fear of bodily functions, and our own first loves. And in Lake Wobegon Summer 1956, we encounter a great American writer in top form.