My Times and Life: A Historian's Progress through a Contentious Age

In My Times and Life, Morton Keller recounts his "not extraordinary life played out in quite extraordinary times" -from the Great Depression through World War II, the cold war, the sixties, and 9/11. A classic American saga of respectable achievement from relatively humble origins, his life through eight-plus decades as a solid, unequivocal, dues-paying member of the middle class resonates beyond the individual to echo the experiences, the beliefs, and the values of his generation.

Set against the backdrop of ever-tumultuous events in the world at large, Keller describes his parents' early life, his childhood in Brooklyn, and his education at the University of Rochester and at Harvard. He recounts his academic career at North Carolina, Penn, Harvard, Oxford, and Brandeis and the scholarly work that made him one of the nation's leading political historians. He tells of his marriage of nearly sixty years, his reflections on dealing with the baby boom generation in the 1960s and 1970s, and his more sedate mode of existence in the inner-directed 1980s and 1990s-all the while riding the wave of social change that transformed American life during the second half of the twentieth century.