Based on material from his radio show A Prairie Home Companion, the book brought Keillor's work to a much wider audience and achieved international success selling over 1 million copies.

The work is a humorous account of life in fictitious Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, a heartland small town.

Due to the nature of the original material, the second half of the novel has many recurring characters but little in the way of plot, resembling an incompletely integrated group of short stories.

In his Los Angeles Times review Richard Eder describes the book as being "filled with good things, but it has its problems."

"[3] Barth Healey however, describes it as "a genuine work of American history" in his New York Times Book Review.