40 pages • 1 hour read
Wallace StegnerCrossing to Safety
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Larry Morgan
Larry is the protagonist and narrator of the novel. At the start of the novel, he is a retired academic and writer. He is from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Both his parents died in a plane crash, and he went from his local college to the University of California at Berkeley to study English. Larry is highly ambitious and industrious, believing hard work to be the most important of all the virtues. Larry nurtures dreams of literary celebrity, believing himself to be in possession of a “gift.” He looks to his new position as a professor in Madison as the first recognition of this gift by the luminaries of high culture. This feeling indicates another aspect of Larry’s ambitions, which form a trajectory from the plainness of his beginnings in Albuquerque, to an imagined seat of culture and sophistication elsewhere. The anxiety and insecurity implicit to these ambitions has major implications for Larry’s relationship with his wife, Sally, his best friends, the Langs, and even his own work.
Sally Morgan
Larry’s wife, Sally, is an academic trained in Classics. She is unblinkingly supportive of Larry to the extent that her own presence in the narrative appears subdued, even suppressed. Despite this, Sally remains a key countervailing voice to Larry’s, changing the tone and direction of Larry’s own thoughts where the Langs are concerned. After the difficult birth of their first child, Lang, Sally is stricken with polio and in serious peril for many years. She emerges disabled, yet firm in her dignity and strength of character. She feels guilty for needing Larry’s constant care and consequently enables his own isolationist and deflective tendencies. Above all, Sally is loyal, a trait she proves as much in her devotion to Charity and Sid as to her own husband and family.
Charity Lang
Charity, the antagonist, is bright, energetic, and attractive. Larry’s feelings for Charity are a mixture of intimidation, admiration, and resentment. Charity is an upright and imposing New Englander, warm yet imperious, and eminently inflexible. Larry comes to resent Charity for her relationship with her husband, Sid. Larry and others believe that Charity exerts too much influence over Sid; the most critical instance of this is Charity’s negative views toward poetry and Sid’s prospective career therein. Charity’s benevolence and authentic selflessness is matched by her need to be in control at all times.
Sidney Lang
Sid is an English professor, Charity’s husband, and Larry’s close friend. Sid’s father cast doubt on Sid’s ambition to study English literature, yet Sid went to Yale and Harvard to do so. Larry is initially intimidated by Sid’s imposing figure and talent but comes to pity him over the course of the novel. Sid harbors an ambition to be a poet but has not found the courage to do so. Charity’s indifference toward the value and meaning of poetry reinforces his lack of courage. For these reasons, Sid doubts himself and resents Charity’s influence over him, which he construes as control. Up until the end of the novel, Sid struggles with asserting himself regarding his wife’s wishes.
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By Wallace Stegner
