Maritta Wolff
American writer
Maritta Martin Wolff Stegman (December 25, 1918 – July 1, 2002) was an American author.
Biography
Wolff was born on December 25, 1918, in Grass Lake, Jackson County, Michigan. She grew up on her grandparents' farm and attended a one-room country school. She was a senior at the University of Michigan when she wrote a novel-length story for an English composition class that won the 1940 Avery Hopwood Award, a university prize for excellent writing, worth $1,000. Whistle Stop is a seamy tale of the Veeches, a shiftless family living in a whistle-stop town near Detroit. The novel, depicting incest, violence, and containing much more vulgar language than was usual at the time, was published the next year by Random House. That Wolff, a mere 22-year-old, was the author of so hard-boiled a novel gave her an instant notoriety, and Whistle Stop became an immediate best-seller, going into five editions and a special Armed Services Edition. Yet the book was not without literary merit, Sinclair Lewis calling it "the most important novel of the year."
Whistle Stop was adapted into a 1946 film starring Ava Gardner and George Raft.
Wolff's second novel, Night Shift, attracted more critical praise, especially for its dialog. It was made into a movie in 1947 starring Ida Lupino and Robert Alda, with the title changed to The Man I Love.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Maritta Wolff” is american writer. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Maritta, Wolff and American, not as a finished interpretation.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6765916. VIAF identifies the subject as 934727. The Library of Congress control number is nr97020795. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1918, 2002, 1940 and 1946.
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This entry incorporates text from “Maritta Wolff” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.