Crossing to Safety: Difference between revisions

Crossing to Safety is a 1987 semi-autobiographical novel by Wallace Stegner which gained broad literary acclaim and commercial popularity.

Stegner was an American historian, novelist, short story writer and conservationist, who is sometimes called "The Dean of Western Writers".^[1] He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972^[2] and the U.S. National Book Award in 1977.^[3]

Crossing to Safety is Stegner's exploration into the mysteries of friendship, and it extends Stegner's distinguished body of work that had already earned him a Pulitzer Prize (for 1971's Angle of Repose) and the National Book Award (for 1976's The Spectator Bird). This story is an eloquent and deeply moving meditation on the idealism and spirit of youth, when the world is full of promise, and on the blows and compromises life inevitably inflicts. The narrator, Larry Morgan and his wife Sally settle in to their new home in Madison, Wisconsin, as Larry begins a term teaching creative writing at the university's English department. They soon befriend another couple, Sid and Charity Lang, and learn of Sid's ambition to succeed as a writer.^[4] They spend much of their time together on summer vacations in the small Vermont town where Charity's family has been coming for decades.

Stegner's powerful but unassuming narrative traces the bond that develops between the Langs and the Morgans from their first meeting in 1937 through their eventual separation on the occasion of Charity's death from cancer.