Like much American popular literature, Lake Wobegon Days affirms widely held American values of loyalty and closeness within family and community. Keillor looks with a loving, yet critical eye at small town life in Minnesota. His portraits of the many characters with their foolishness, cruelty, absurdity, kindness, narrowness, and eccentricities ring true to readers who grew up, as Keillor did, in a Midwestern small town. Although his characters are Minnesotans of Norwegian and German descent, with distinctive voices and customs, they have recognizable equivalents all over America.

Listeners are drawn to A Prairie Home Companion and readers to Lake Wobegon Days mainly by this quality of "critical nostalgia."

Describing his purpose, Keillor said, "I tend to want to take lovely, ordinary things and raise them to a slightly brighter, more extravagant, elegant level, in order to express what I feel is the innate elegance, grace and...