Crossing to Safety: Wallace Stegner (Penguin Modern Classics)

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JENNIFER BYRNE: I'm getting a sense of your taste, Chars, because it's Charlotte who's brought us our classic this evening. It's the 15th and final novel of Wallace Stegner - a deceptively simple story of the lifelong friendship between two couples, with the beautiful title Crossing To Safety. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{

JASON STEGER: She is capable of great generosity, but she's pretty... She'd be driving you bonkers, wouldn't she? 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. JENNIFER BYRNE: It's worth mentioning he was 78. This was Wallace Stegner's last book. So it's like a bulletin at the end of a long life. Geoffrey, how did you respond to it?

CHARLOTTE WOOD: Because of what he says all the way through, when he steps out of the narrative and says, 'You can't write a book about good people.' And how Charity challenges him, and I think Hallie, Charity's daughter challenges him to say, 'You should write fiction about good and decent human beings.' And he says, 'Well, you can't really. There's no drama, there's no villains, there's no angels.' You know, where that moment where he steps out and says, 'Now... There is a serpent in this garden. And you'll be thinking one of us has to sleep with the other', or, you know, it's... disruption has to happen, and none of that's gonna happen. JASON STEGER: Yeah, I can't disagree with anything. I find that there's something wonderful about it. MARIEKE HARDY: When you said 'at times monstrous', but monstrous in a way that someone in our family would be. She's not a fictional character. She's a real person that we've all met. Showcasing a talent often as breathtaking as the landscape that was Stegner's lifelong muse, this first posthumous essay collection by the novelist, historian and biographer who died in 1993 confirms Continue reading »

Sally is still sleeping. I slide out of bed and go barefooted across the cold wooden floor. The calendar, as I pass it, insists that it is not the one I remember. It says, accurately, that it is 1972, and that the month is August. Stegner has said about his life - "I've made a kind of American hegira from essential poverty through the academic world, from real ignorance (my parents never finished the sixth grade) to living in a world where my natural companions are people of real brilliance. As Americans, it seems to me, we are expected to make the whole pilgrimage of civilization in a single lifetime. That's a hell of a thing to ask of anybody. It seems to me an extra hardship. It may also be an extra challenge, and it may be good for us." Fiction Book Review: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Earle Stegner". PublishersWeekly.com. 1987-08-04. Cataract sufferers must see like this when the bandages are removed after the operation: every detail as sharp as if seen for the first time, yet familiar too, known from before the time of blindness, the remembered and the seen coalescing as in a stereoscope.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 » 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. 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 » My feet take me up the road to the gate, and through it. Just inside the gate the road forks. I ignore the Ridge House road and choose instead the narrow dirt road that climbs around the hill to the right. John Wightman, whose cottage sits at the end of it, died fifteen years ago. He will not be up to protest my walking in his ruts. It is a road I have walked hundreds of times, a lovely lost tunnel through the trees, busy this morning with birds and little shy rustling things, my favorite road anywhere.