William Decker

author of Kodak Elegy: A Cold War Childhood

February 4, 2013

William Merrill Decker (Ph.D., The University of Iowa) is professor of English at Oklahoma State University. He is the author of The Literary Vocation of Henry Adams (1990), Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America Before Telecommunications (1998), and Kodak Elegy: A Cold War Childhood (2012). He an editor of and contributor to Henry Adams and the Need to Know (2005) and has authored essays that appear in The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing (2009), Hearts of Darkness: Melville, Conrad, and Narratives of Oppression (2010), and Leather-Stocking Redux; or, Old Tales, New Essays (2011). The recipient of Fulbright and DAAD fellowships, he has taught at universities in Belgium and Germany. He serves on the editorial board of The Bedford Anthology of American Literature.

What was it like to grow up as the son of an Eastman Kodak engineer during the company's glory days? Kodak Elegy: A Cold War Childhood presents a vivid portrait of life in the Rochester suburbs where residents eagerly conformed to period expectations: two kids, two cars, a move from a snug middle-class neighborhood to a spacious upper-middle-class subdivision. In recollecting the blithe and troubled scenes of America's postwar prosperity, this demographic memoir evokes a bygone era with rich detail and biting clarity. Depicting the banalities of the place and time, Kodak Elegy narrates a political education shaped by the Civil Rights Movement, John F. Kennedy's assassination, the Vietnam War and the constant threat of nuclear exchange. Concerned throughout with the destructive forces masked by American affluence and idealism, the book closes with a meditation on the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, a crime perpetrated by a western New Yorker in the state where the author has long made his home.

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2013-honorees/william-decker

Last Updated: 12 January 2022