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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 » 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. 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 »
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.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. 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. This long, thoughtful novel about a retired historian who researches and writes about his pioneer grandparents garnered Stegner a Pulitzer Prize. Continue reading »
It’s subtle and I could be wrong here, but it seems to me that Stegner is clearly saying, halfway through the book, that it is being written by Morgan: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.
It is at first disconcerting that the narrator sounds half the age of the author's narrator: Lyman Ward is an elderly, severely crippled historian at odds with his wife and children over his Continue reading »
Overall Summary
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. 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 » Stegner's love of unspoilt nature and of the American West shines forth in these 17 graceful essays. This book by the Pulitzer Prize and NBA winner is a National Book Critics Circle Award nominee for Continue reading » verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{
Find sources: "Crossing to Safety"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( August 2014) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Larry only partially succeeds at becoming a successful novelist, and he does so late in life. Sid spends his life trying to get tenure writing articles that he doesn’t care about, but it’s all because of Charity. The couple is an ironic one: They are unsuccessful from the perspective of American literature because they don’t make much progress despite their idealist beginnings. The Langs remain unstable and alienated, even from each other, unable to conceive of a life that isn’t driven by the accumulation of capital. The Morgans never transcend their core struggle to find a community they naturally resonate with or find true satisfaction in their work.After all, he’s a famous novelist, and, for 35 years, Larry and his wife Sally have been close friends of the couple. 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. Fiction Book Review: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Earle Stegner". PublishersWeekly.com. 1987-08-04. 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. 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 »
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