An undistinguished writing professor at Stanford when he was commissioned by the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) in 1955 to write ""an approved history of the oil venture's early days,"" future Continue reading » I first read Crossing to Safety in the mid-1990s while on vacation in Estes Park, Colorado, where the nature around us echoed the beauty of Stegner’s descriptions of nature in Vermont at the Lang compound. My wife read it then, too, and we both loved the book. Boswell, Evelyn (2006-10-05). "New Stegner professor to hit the ground running". Montana State University.

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. I’m ashamed. For years now we haven’t been as close as we used to be. I let myself get irritated at her way of taking charge of everything. I thought she was a tyrant to all of you in the family. I still do. But I shouldn’t have ever let myself forget what a wonderfully unselfish friend she has been. I should have had the grace to forgive what I knew she couldn’t help. We parted almost as if we weren’t friends, and it’s been eight years.” Reading the novel this time around, I found that I really didn’t like Charity, and I wasn’t too thrilled with Larry. And Sid, well, he was pretty wispy. Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? What Stegner is saying, essentially, is that such a book can’t be written, but — look! — I’ve written it.

Overall Summary

Everyday life can be compelling in the hands of someone like Stegner because it is shown to be lived by complex people with a mix of good and bad, people who are attractive and also disappointing. In writing Crossing to Safety, he has made all four of his main characters attractive and disappointing. I think what he’s saying is that something as seemingly mundane as the friendship of two couples can be as riveting and universal as tragic choices or spectacular heroics. That everyday life — the life each of us lives — can be the subject of great writing.

After telling her that a book about them would be a falsification, Larry ruminates to himself — and Stegner ruminates to his reader — the difficulty of making “a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these.” And he goes on: But, even if I am, there is no question, it seems to me, that Stegner is using Larry’s difficulties with the idea of writing a book about Charity and Sid to get the reader of Crossing to Safety thinking. Hallie, you’ve got the wrong idea of what writers do. They don’t understand any more than other people. They invent only plots they can resolve. They ask the questions they can answer. Those aren’t people you see in books, those are constructs. Novels or biographies, it makes no difference. I can’t reproduce the real Sid and Charity Lang, much less explain them; and if I invented them I’d be falsifying something I don’t want to falsify.” “Taking charge of everything”

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This could be ascribed to authorial chutzpah or even authorial arrogance. But I think Stegner is communicating a deeper insight here. He is saying to the reader that it is nearly impossible to write an interesting book about friendship, especially the friendship of two couples, from the point of view of one member of one of the couples. He is saying that quiet, private lives, such as those lived by Charity, Sid, Sally and Larry, have none of the pizzazz that popular novels seem to need. That a book of this sort would be read by no one. Edward Herrmann is perhaps best known to younger audiences as kindly, patrician Richard Gilmore on the television series Gilmore Girls. Here, Herrmann uses his same elegant persona to amplify and Continue reading »

Well, maybe not Sally. She is strong and long-suffering, first as a pregnant faculty wife and later as the victim of polio, and seemingly without personality flaws. The novel is dedicated to Stegner’s own wife, and maybe that’s why Sally isn’t given any rough edges. Find sources: "Crossing to Safety"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( August 2014) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Want to learn the ideas in Crossing To Safety better than ever? Read the world’s #1 book summary of Crossing To Safety by Wallace Stegner here. The premise of Crossing to Safety seems simple: Two young couples meet in 1937 as lowest-rung members of the University of Wisconsin faculty at Madison. They fall into friendship and, for the rest of their lives, through ups and downs, remain deeply bonded. Charity and Sid are rich and, at every turn, are offering money, influence or help of some other sort to Larry and Sally who are hungry for their help. I didn’t like the power dynamic that they seemed to have. It would have been suffocating for me.The book never dragged for me, even though Charity’s bullying got on my nerves. Larry told his story well, even if he seemed much too self-contained. There are rough edges galore among the other four. Charity is one of those highly competent people who likes to organize herself and everyone around her, particularly, in her case, her husband Sid, an English professor. She has great ambitions for him, but, although he looks like a Greek god, he’s a dreamy kind of a fellow, rich enough not to have to work hard.

Retirees Joseph and Ruth Allston find their placid, rural California life disrupted by a hippie who builds a treehouse on their property and by a young married couple tragically affected by pregnancy Continue reading » After all, he’s a famous novelist, and, for 35 years, Larry and his wife Sally have been close friends of the couple. Now, twenty years after spending a year with Sid and Charity in and around Florence and after a separation of nearly a decade, the Morgans have returned because Charity is dying of stomach cancer.These 31 classic stories record much of the cultural climate of 20th-century America, its West in particular, constituting, as the NBA and Pulitzer Prize-winning author affectionately notes, not an Continue reading » Yet, the proof, I think, is in the way the participants see the relationship. Larry and Sally needed help to get on their feet and make their way in a difficult world. Charity and Sid found joy and delight at helping the Morgans. Yet, here Sally and Larry are, responding to Charity’s call to come once again to the home and community that she and Sid have built, as she is on the edge of leaving it. “So twisted together” I am their friend. I respect and love them both. What is more, our lives have been so twisted together that I couldn’t write them without writing Sally and me as well. I wonder if I could recreate any of us without my portraits being tainted by pity or self-pity. “I tell them now” This time I was less enamored with it, but not because I found fault with Stegner’s writing or storytelling.