Whistle Stop: A Novel [Paperback]

Maritta Wolff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 29, 2005

Now back in print -- Maritta Wolff's 1941 masterpiece about small-town Midwestern life in post-Depression America

Whistle Stop, published to rave reviews and astonishing commercial success, is the story of the Veech family, an oversize, poverty-stricken tribe trying to make good in a cruel world. Through the course of a punishingly hot summer, we experience life with the six children and three adult Veeches as they bicker, brawl, make up, and provide titillating morsels of scandal for the neighborhood. A work of darkly comic grotesque, replete with shades of Flannery O'Connor, Whistle Stop is also a wrenching and earnest rumination on the tragedy of thwarted love.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"If you missed Whistle Stop, you missed the launching of one of the most promising literary careers of our time."

-- The New York Times

"Whistle Stop had a kind of raw, flaming vitality which was impossible to resist, plus an uncanny, ironic knowledge of human motives. From her story of the Veeches -- a raffish and disorderly family who lived in a small Michigan town -- it was obvious that Miss Wolff possessed that unquenchable interest in people which is part of the born novelist's equipment."

-- Edith Walton, The New York Times Book Review (1942)

"In Maritta Wolff we may salute a young author whom everyone must know."

-- Sinclair Lewis

"[Wolff] writes the seamy side of life with glittering skill and a brutal, brawling, turbulent sense of character and human drama."

-- Orville Prescott, The New York Times (1947)

"A stunning performance."

-- Clifton Fadiman, The New Yorker (1941)

About the Author

Maritta Wolff was born in 1918. Whistle Stop, her first novel, won the Avery Hopwood Award in 1940. A runaway bestseller, the book was also printed as a special Armed Forces edition for American troops during World War II. Whistle Stop was made into a movie (starring Ava Gardner) in 1946. In the next two decades, Ms. Wolff authored more than five novels, but she hid her final, unpublished manuscript in her refrigerator until her death in 2002. Recently rediscovered, that novel, Sudden Rain, is now available from Scribner.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (March 29, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743254864
• ISBN-13: 978-0743254861
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #990,826 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book will stop your heart, January 30, 2004

By 

Robert Platt "montraville" (NY NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Whistle stop (Paperback)

I discovered a lovingly-preserved copy of Whistle Stop in the basement sale of the Boonton Public Library in Boonton, NJ, and frankly, my life has never been the same since. Maritta Wolff wrote this, her masterwork, in college, and it emerged from her pen almost utterly flawless, written with an artless candor perhaps only possible at her unaffected age.

It's the story of a down-at-the heels family in a sleepy farm town in Michigan, and how they endure fate, and how they tempt it. Some are in pain, some are violent, some are ambitious, or selfish, and some have given up. Descriptively, you smell the sun-baked overgrown grass, you hear the creak of dilapidated floorboards, you hear and feel each taunt and jeer, and you feel their love and hate as if it is your own. Everyone is flawed and desperate, but everyone is alive in a way people don't seem to be anymore.

After you invite these characters into your home, they won't ever move out, which is for the best, because each one is a touchstone to a facet of your soul.

3.0 out of 5 stars Not bad for a college kid., November 24, 2011

By 

Richard S. Dixon Jr. "Chatham Books" (Chatham, Virginia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Whistle Stop: A Novel (Paperback)

I am a big fan of American literature of the early 20th century and liked this book very much for several reasons. I think Wolff does a fine job depicting the lives of the Veeches, their many small triumphs and big tragedies. I did find the list of characters a bit overwhelming at times, but got used to it after awhile. When one considers how young Wolff was at the time, then the book is even more an amazing feat. It is definitely worth the time reading; the 1946 film version, which I saw online, is not, unfortunately. The movie wastes the talents of George Raft (Kenny) and Ava Gardner (Mary) and distorts the novel's plotline beyond recognition. The only thing worth watching the film for is Ava Gardner, who is -- at 24 -- amazingly beautiful in every frame of this film.

Back to the book. I would say that Wolff reminds me of Dawn Powell a bit and strives to achieve the realism of Theodore Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis, or even Willa Cather. Cather is the master novelist; Wolff falls short. She does not even reach the level of Dawn Powell, the great and relatively unknown author of very powerful novels of New York in the forties and fifties, as well as Ohio in the twenties. I am a fanatical Cather reader; a devoted Powell fan. Maritta Wolff has my appreciation and admiration, if not the emotional allegiance of Cather and Powell.

I do recommend this book, however. It's a good story; the characters are believable and interesting. I am contemplating even reading more of Wolff, and commend this book to others with the caveat that there are better eye-witnesses to life in the forties and better books out there to be read and considered.