"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
A Novel
Description
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.
Reviews
"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)
