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”

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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 »

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 » 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.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. 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. 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.

Larry sees their warts but has warts of his own. He’s a workaholic. He’s judgmental. He’s a stranger to self-doubt. Thorniness 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. Crossing to Safety is a 1987 semi-autobiographical novel by "The Dean of Western Writers", [1] Wallace Stegner. It gained broad literary acclaim and commercial popularity. 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. 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.”

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” This long, thoughtful novel about a retired historian who researches and writes about his pioneer grandparents garnered Stegner a Pulitzer Prize. Continue reading » What Stegner is saying, essentially, is that such a book can’t be written, but — look! — I’ve written it.