The fictional town of Wayne, set in northwest Illinois is the setting for "Elegy." The novel follows the lives of the fifteen members of the Class of 1921 of Wayne High School through the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World War II, and into the 1950s and '60s. Using Thomas Gray's poem "An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" as a template, English teacher Edeth Cullen records the lives of her classmates through those decades.