Editor’s note: Dave Dempsey and his brother Jack have authored Ink Trails: Michigan’s Famous and Forgotten Authors. The book is currently available through Michigan State University Press.

Few Michigan readers have heard of her, but once upon a time – 1941, to be exact – Maritta Wolff was a literary sensation with a best-selling debut novel and praise from Sinclair Lewis for her unflinching realism. The remarkable career of this Michigan native is worth recalling.

Born in Grass Lake, Michigan on Christmas Day of 1918, Wolff was the daughter of a young local woman and a newspaper/novelist father. Her childhood was lonely, Wolff later recalled. She said she “seldom played with other children” and attended a one-room rural school. “It would be nice if I could say I walked two miles to school every day, but if I remember correctly it was only half a mile that I walked.”

Wolff enrolled at The University of Michigan after graduation from high school. Intending to study journalism but ending up an English major, she produced an 830-page manuscript for a composition class. It captured the university’s 1940 Avery Hopwood Prize for writing. It also caught a publisher’s eye, and in a 450-page redraft, became a 1941 blockbuster.

Maritta Wolff’s University of Michigan student i.d., circa 1936

Whistle Stop is a story of the struggling, squabbling Veech family in a small town not unlike Grass Lake. Its most memorable characters are the charming, shambling party boy Freddy; his beautiful, superficially aloof sister Mary; and the clan’s matriarch, Molly. Mother and grandmother to a complex family, the rotund Molly fights to hold the family together in the midst of calamities she seems not to fathom—alcoholism, infidelity, incest, dementia, and sociopathy.

The book shocked critics and readers because of both its subject matter and the age of its author. How, they asked, could a twenty-three-year-old have acquired such penetrating insight into human complexity, and how could she render dialogue so realistically and faithfully that one reviewer called it “scientifically exact?”

Wolff provided one explanation early in her career. “My one hobby was developing, as far back as I can remember, even under the handicap of my somewhat isolated life in the country, an inordinate interest in people and everything happening to them.”

The result was good enough to charm author Sinclair Lewis, also a chronicler of the depths beneath small-town Midwestern life. Commenting on Whistle Stop, he tagged Wolff as a writer to watch, saying she “writes the seamy side of life with glittering skill and a brutal, brawling, turbulent sense of character and human drama.” He called the book the most important novel of the year.

An encore novel, Night Shift, followed in 1942. A New York Times review praised the book’s description and dialogue of automobile-bumper plant workers, taxi drivers, greasy-spoon waitresses and “beautiful dumb women and beautiful smart ones who haunt small-time night clubs.” The setting of Night Shift is a mid-sized industrial town like the Jackson, Michigan, of the early 1940s. These two early novels became films, after adulteration.

In the 1950s, Wolff moved to the Los Angeles area. She published four novels after Night Shift, including The Big Nickelodeon in 1962, then apparently fell silent the rest of her life before passing away in 2002. But the story was not so simple. Tucked away in her Los Angeles kitchen refrigerator was a manuscript she had completed in the early 1970s but never published. Her family took the manuscript to Scribner, which published it in 2005 as Sudden Rain. Prominent critics took notice of the posthumous novel. Janet Maslin of the New York Times said the novel preserved a cultural Pompeii of American life “flawlessly in literary lava.”

In her eighth decade, Maritta Wolff made one of her few pilgrimages to the town of her youth. The occasion was the 1992 dedication of the restored railroad depot that had helped make Grass Lake “a whistle stop.” By that time, with her initial novel out of print and difficult to find, the city’s leaders may have been unaware that the book illuminated what Sinclair Lewis had called “the seamy side” of its people and ways. Wolff rode among locals on an Amtrak train from Ann Arbor that made a special stop in Grass Lake to commemorate the depot’s rededication.

Readers who rededicate themselves to the seven novels of Wolff will find a supreme storytelling talent worth far more attention than she receives today.