The fictional town serves as the setting for many of Keillor's stories and novels, gaining an international audience with Lake Wobegon Days in 1985.

Described as a small rural town in central Minnesota, the events and adventures of the townspeople provided Keillor with a wealth of humorous and often touching stories.

Keillor's weekly monologue about Lake Wobegon included recurring elements:[5] The fictional settlement Lake Wobegon resembles many small farm towns in the Upper Midwest, especially western Minnesota, North Dakota, and to some extent, northern Iowa, Wisconsin, eastern South Dakota and northeastern Montana.

These are rural, sparsely populated areas that were settled only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, largely by homesteading immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia.

"[6] Keillor formed most of his ideas for Lake Wobegon while working at public radio station KSJR[7] on the campus of St. John's University in Collegeville, basing it on Avon, where he lived, and other local towns such as Albany, Freeport, Cold Spring, Richmond, Rockville, St. Joseph, St. Stephen, St. Wendell and Holdingford.

The programs distributed at live performances of A Prairie Home Companion in 2005 had a map showing Lake Wobegon about two miles north of Holdingford, northwest of St.

Keillor chronicles a number of bizarre incidents in the fictional town's early history, akin to the events in Black River Falls in Wisconsin Death Trip.

Keillor identifies the original founders of what became Lake Wobegon as New England Unitarian missionaries, at least one of whom came to convert the Native American Ojibwe Indians through interpretive dance.

The fictional town is the home of the Whippets baseball team, tuna hotdish, snow, Norwegian bachelor farmers, ice fishing, tongues frozen to cold metal objects, and lutefisk—fish treated with lye which, after being reconstituted, is reminiscent of "the afterbirth of a dog or the world's largest chunk of phlegm.

"[11] But it is also the home of the Mist County Fair, old-fashioned show yards with flowers "like Las Vegas showgirls", sweet corn, a magnificent grain elevator, and the pleasant lake itself.

[12] The characterization that "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and the children are all above average" has been used to describe a real and pervasive human tendency to overestimate one's achievements and capabilities in relation to others.

In response to a listener query on the Prairie Home website, he pointed out that, in keeping with their Scandinavian heritage, Wobegonians prefer to downplay, rather than overestimate, their capabilities or achievements.