Garrison Keillor and Janet Groth will discuss Groth’s memoir "The Receptionist: An Education at The New Yorker"

Start: 09/27/2012 7:00 pm

Literary legends come to life when Garrison Keillor and Janet Groth discuss John Berryman, Joseph Mitchell, Muriel Spark, E.J. Kahn, Calvin Trillin, and the many other contributors whom Groth met while working at The New Yorker in the 1950s and 60s.

Janet Groth and Joseph Mitchell

Thanks to a successful interview with a painfully shy E. B. White, a beautiful nineteen-year-old hazel-eyed Midwesterner landed a job as receptionist at The New Yorker. There she stayed for two decades, becoming the general office factotum--watching and registering the comings and goings, marriages and divorces, scandalous affairs, failures, triumphs, and tragedies of the eccentric inhabitants of the eighteenth floor. In addition to taking their messages, Groth watered their plants, walked their dogs, boarded their cats, and sat their children (and houses) when they traveled. And although she dreamed of becoming a writer herself, she never advanced at the magazine.

This memoir of a particular time and place is as much about why that was so as it is about Groth’s fascinating relationships with poet John Berryman (who proposed marriage), essayist Joseph Mitchell (who took her to lunch every Friday), and playwright Muriel Spark (who invited her to Christmas dinner in Tuscany), as well as E. J. Kahn, Calvin Trillin, Renata Adler, Peter Devries, Charles Addams, and many other New Yorker contributors and bohemian denizens of Greenwich Village in its heyday.

During those single-in-the-city years, Groth tried on many identities--Nice Girl, Sex Pot, Dumb Blonde, World Traveler, Doctoral Candidate--but eventually she would have to leave The New Yorker to find her true self.

"[Groth's] collected the sort of gossipy anecdotes that would have you hanging on her every word at a literary cocktail party."--Entertainment Weekly

“A literate, revelatory examination of self.”--The Boston Globe

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Janet Groth, Emeritus Professor of English at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, has also taught at Vassar, Brooklyn College, the University of Cincinnati, and Columbia. She was a Fulbright lecturer in Norway and a visiting fellow at Yale and is the author of Edmund Wilson: A Critic for Our Time.

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One of America’s most beloved radio hosts and acclaimed humorists, Garrison Keillor was born in 1942 in Anoka, Minnesota, and began his radio career as a freshman at the University of Minnesota, from which he graduated in 1966. He went to work for Minnesota Public Radio in 1969, and on July 6, 1974, he hosted the first broadcast of A Prairie HomeCompanion in St. Paul. Today, some 4.3 million listeners on close to 600 public radio stations coast to coast and beyond tune in to the show each week. Keillor has been honored with Grammy, ACE, and George Foster Peabody awards, the National Humanities Medal, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His many books include Lake Wobegon Days, The Book of Guys, Pilgrims: A Wobegon Romance, and Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny (Viking). He is the host of the daily program The Writer's Almanac and the editor of several anthologies of poetry, most recently, Good Poems: American Places (Viking). In 2006, Keillor played himself in the movie adaptation of his show, a film directed by Robert Altman.

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