Crossing to Safety is a 1987 semi-autobiographical novel by Wallace Stegner. Structured around a series of flashbacks in the mind of an aging writer, Larry Morgan, throughout a single day, the novel examines the challenges of youth, idealism, and the often unarticulated but lifelong process of compromise that comes with the search for a stable place in the world. Stegner’s novel explores these ideas via Larry’s perspective on two academic couples: Larry and his wife, Sally Morgan, and Sidney and Charity Lang. The flashbacks extend from Larry’s time as a young professor during the Great Depression through his later years near the end of the 20th century, and Stegner uses Larry’s philosophical musings to examine The Inevitable Distortions of Memory, The Pitfalls of Seeking Self-Worth in Academia, and the internal struggles that arise from Navigating the Effects of Disillusionment.

Stegner’s novel is both a reaction against persistent and formulaic pre-Depression models of American literature and a historicist character study that reveals their underlying motivational and effective blueprints. Because he refuses to fully resolve the characters’ struggles, they remain incomplete and mysterious, especially because the other characters are described through the biased lens of the protagonist’s reflections. Through this kaleidoscopic view of life’s imperfections, Stegner offers a strong improvisational model that portrays the endurance of human relationships over time.

 This guide refers to the 2006 Penguin Classics edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain descriptions of illness and ableism.

Plot Summary

Larry first recalls his early years in Madison, in which he struggles to secure a job in a liberal arts college while also trying to complete his first novel cloistered in a small, dingy basement apartment. During this time frame, he tries to convince the academy staff to extend his teaching job so that he can support his wife Sally and their expected child. In a stroke of luck, Larry and Sally Morgan become fast friends with Sid and Charity Lang. The Langs, who were born into prestigious families, are highly educated, wealthy, and ostensibly well integrated into their society, but the Morgans come from poor, uneducated backgrounds and struggle to fit into this more rarified world. However, they soon develop a strong bond because both couples are expecting a child. In his retrospective analysis, Larry notes that despite their economic and cultural differences, the couples’ shared interests in humanistic pursuits such as writing, literature, and spirituality have bound them together across time as they grapple both separately and collectively with a range of existential stresses, from unexpected illnesses to the precarity of forced career changes.

Meanwhile, in the early years of the couples’ friendship, they attend a myriad of parties and concerts together, and the Langs quickly begin to enrich the Morgans’ otherwise difficult time in Madison. The Langs also introduce the Morgans to other local academics, through which Larry begins to build a network and gain the accompanying fiscal and job security. He works hard in his temporary position at the local university, where Sid is also a faculty member, and in addition to Larry’s teaching load, he also works diligently to write novels. As he gains confidence in the academic realm, his idealized vision of the Morgans slowly wears off, and he realizes that behind their polished public veneer, they too have lingering dysfunctions of their own. Charity, who highly values social capital, clashes with Sid over the likelihood of his ability to secure tenure, a feat that she deems vital to their attempts to integrate smoothly into the academic community that she yearns to belong to. Even as Larry goes on to pursue his ambitions of becoming a novelist, relinquishing by necessity the traditional path of an academic life, Charity dismisses Sid’s similar extracurricular passion for writing poetry. Despite Charity’s wish that Sid conform to the usual academic standards, he eventually comes to feel that he has made enough money to detach from the careerism that has saturated their lives.

Larry’s account of his marriage highlights his tendency to focus on his own work and perspective, while Sally’s wishes and opinions fade into the background. During Sally’s pregnancy and after his daughter Lang is born, he must also make a conscious effort to balance the time he spends on work with the time he spends at home in the company of his family. The tensions in both couples’ relationships grow more complicated through each successive flashback that the narrator-Larry offers. During an outing between the Langs and the Morgans, Sally contracts polio, although Larry does not specifically name the disease until much later in the narrative. Her health slowly deteriorates over time, and the necessities of supporting her and making concessions to her worsening disabilities challenge Larry’s expectations of building a life focused primarily on his own intellectual and creative labors. Sally also worries about being a burden on Larry. Meanwhile, the Langs’ relationship is tested as Charity grows more upset at Sid’s poetic meditations. She asserts that Sid has not yet shown the required “product,” or concrete work, that would justify his commitment to a secondary creative endeavor. In Larry’s view, her habit of imposing her will on her loved ones is one of her greatest faults.

Although Larry only partially succeeds at becoming a successful novelist; this feat is accomplished late and punctuated by the difficulties surrounding Sally’s illness. At the same time, Sid makes efforts to please Charity, and he ends up spending his life in the pursuit of tenure, ignoring his poetic ambitions to write academic articles that he doesn’t care about. Yet even amidst his discontent, Charity’s realism anchors him, giving him a social and moral stability that he could not develop alone. While Sid and Charity provide Sally with a great deal of support amidst her polio-related difficulties, a rift eventually arises between the two couples, and they do not see each other for eight years. The chronological timeline of these events is presented in a nonlinear way, with their eventual reunion framing Larry’s haphazard flashbacks of earlier moments in the couples’ lives. The reunion occurs because Charity develops stomach cancer, and the four characters make efforts to reconnect in the face of her imminent death. Larry is surprised to realize that Charity has retained her strength of will in the midst of her illness, and she dictates how her final moments will progress, imposing her wishes on the others, he and Sid both struggle to reconcile their lingering resentments with their sorrow over the closeness of her inevitable end. The novel deliberately concludes on an open-ended note, with a distraught Sid abruptly leaving the room as Charity demands that he and the others attend a traditional picnic as planned rather than tending to her in her final moments. As Larry heads out to find Sid, he contemplates the harsh realities of mortality, wondering how he would feel if Sally were to die and leave him alone. In the novel’s final moments, he suddenly comes upon Sid in the dark.