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The George Kelley Collection
Erotic Stories
Whistle Stop
Maritta M. Wolff
New York: Popular Library, 1941.
Bison Catalog Record
Introducing the Veech family: a drab and shiftless bunch living in a ramshackle house in a small Michigan town. At the head of this coarse and impoverished tribe is Molly Veech, fat and easy-going, and Sam, her quiet, elderly husband. There are six children, including Mary, mistress of the town's biggest racketeer; Kenny, a handsome, brutal lazybones; Ernie, the good-looking but aggressive older brother; twins Jen and Josette, and 18-year old Carl. Mary's illegitmate daughter, Dorothy, and an alcoholic boarder named Jud Higgins also share space in the Veech household. Despite their constant squabbling and a variety of unpleasant incidents, Molly manages to hold her family together during the course of a hot and breathless summer. Written during the author's senior year in college, Whistle Stop won the Avery Hopwood Award for Fiction in 1940, and according to one critic, "if she can write this way at twenty-two, she should be good for a banning in Boston before she's twenty-five" (Clifton Fadiman, New York Times, May 17, 1941, p.88).