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Night Shift
Originally published in 1942 to rave reviews and astonishing commercial success, Night Shift dramatizes the working class life of the Midwest during World War II with the excitement of melodrama, the vividness of documentary, and the page-turning quality of the best commercial fiction.
Sally Otis works herself to the bone as a waitress, supporting her three children and a jobless younger sister. With her bills mounting and no rest in sight, Sally's resolve is beginning to crumble when her swaggering older sister, Petey Braun, appears on the scene. Petey, with her furs and jewels and exotic trips, is an American career woman—one who makes a career of men. But when Petey gets a gig at the glamorous, rowdy local nightclub, it will forever alter the world of the struggling Otis family.
Night Shift “manages to be touching and horrible, sentimental and brutal all at the same time. It is both sordidly real and theatrically melodramatic. It’s good” ( New York Times ).
Sally Otis works herself to the bone as a waitress, supporting her three children and a jobless younger sister. With her bills mounting and no rest in sight, Sally's resolve is beginning to crumble when her swaggering older sister, Petey Braun, appears on the scene. Petey, with her furs and jewels and exotic trips, is an American career woman—one who makes a career of men. But when Petey gets a gig at the glamorous, rowdy local nightclub, it will forever alter the world of the struggling Otis family.
Night Shift “manages to be touching and horrible, sentimental and brutal all at the same time. It is both sordidly real and theatrically melodramatic. It’s good” ( New York Times ).
560 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1942
6 people are currently reading
281 people want to read
About the author
Maritta Wolff
14 books7 followersMaritta Martin Wolff Stegman (December 25, 1918 – July 1, 2002) was an American author.
She was born on December 25, 1918 in born in Grass Lake, Jackson County, Michigan. She grew up on her grandparents' farm and attended a one-room country school. Wolff 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 forces edition. Yet the book was not without literary merit, Sinclair Lewis calling it "the most important novel of the year."
Wolff's second novel, Night Shift, attracted more critical praise, especially for its dialog. Over the next 20 years she wrote four more best-selling novels. Always a private person who shunned publicity, Wolff, in 1972, refused her publisher's request to go on a promotional tour for a recently finished novel, Sudden Rain, and as a result the novel was never published during her lifetime. At that point she evidently ceased writing fiction.
While at the University of Michigan she had met and married a prolific young writer, Hubert Skidmore, who published six novels before he was 30. Skidmore died in a house fire in 1946. In 1947 Wolff married a costume jeweller, Leonard Stegman, by whom she had a son, Hugh Stegman.
After Wolff's death, the manuscript for Sudden Rain, which had been kept safely in her refrigerator for the last thirty years of her life, was published (along with re-issues of Whistle Stop and Night Shift) to much acclaim.
She was born on December 25, 1918 in born in Grass Lake, Jackson County, Michigan. She grew up on her grandparents' farm and attended a one-room country school. Wolff 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 forces edition. Yet the book was not without literary merit, Sinclair Lewis calling it "the most important novel of the year."
Wolff's second novel, Night Shift, attracted more critical praise, especially for its dialog. Over the next 20 years she wrote four more best-selling novels. Always a private person who shunned publicity, Wolff, in 1972, refused her publisher's request to go on a promotional tour for a recently finished novel, Sudden Rain, and as a result the novel was never published during her lifetime. At that point she evidently ceased writing fiction.
While at the University of Michigan she had met and married a prolific young writer, Hubert Skidmore, who published six novels before he was 30. Skidmore died in a house fire in 1946. In 1947 Wolff married a costume jeweller, Leonard Stegman, by whom she had a son, Hugh Stegman.
After Wolff's death, the manuscript for Sudden Rain, which had been kept safely in her refrigerator for the last thirty years of her life, was published (along with re-issues of Whistle Stop and Night Shift) to much acclaim.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
August 8, 2012
take 2: goodreads ate the review i wrote last night (i hope it was tasty) so i'm going to give it another whirl... thank you, karen, uber-reviewer extraordinaire for sharing your enthusiasm for this unsung author, who deserves more readers. she seems in some ways like jim thompson's other half.
************
night shift shows what an ace maritta wolff was at characterization. the people fashioned by her are sharply defined, and emotionally accessible. even if they stay for only a page or two, then sweep on and out of the novel, they are finely rendered. those that stick around for the long haul are even more captivating.
sally otis, is the sun in the solar system of night shift. she's a waitress struggling to support her three children while also taking care of one of her sisters, her brother, another roomer in the house where she has her flat and boards with her, the neighbours across the hall. add the mobster who harrasses her, and the absent husband we eventually meet, and even the absent sister, who swirls again into her life, and you see all orbit around her, all gravitate to her in this book. normally, i wouldn't give two figs about family drama in novel form, but sally is so sweet that i think anyone would want to stick around to see if she makes it through okay because to read sally is to know her, and to believe in her. this is somebody who lives only on the page, and yet i'd trust her more than some of the people who live and breathe around me. sally doesn't forget you even if you are far away; her delight in bringing joy to the people in her life makes you feel proud to know her.
and if sally is the sun, then i guess her sister petey is the moon. petey comes to dominate the second half of the novel. a night club singer, wise in the ways of the world, possessed of an indomitable spirit, and itchy feet, she gets involved with the mobster to distract him from his pursuit of sally and winds up falling in love for the first time with another man of questionable ethics and makes some questionable decisions of her own as a result of the intensity of her feelings.
the novel is very much a slice of life. it tells their stories from point A to point B -- there is some closure for sally and petey and some of the other characters yes, but when we leave them we are keenly aware that they will continue after we are gone. some minor characters, like harold, sally's eldest son, seem to have a whole story that is only alluded to throughout the book, while we follow the two fascinating sisters, and i do sort of wonder why those parts were left in. while i was interested in stories like harold's, it did seem the author's own interest wasn't sustained, the off-shoots didn't seem integral to the novel. had i been her editor, i'm not sure i would've left them in at all. i can't really blame the author for this, and when i think she was only twenty-four when this was published, i'm astounded by the insight she had into humanity, to draw these people so well, so young. i suspect, she, like sally, was possessed of an old soul.
4.5 stars
************
night shift shows what an ace maritta wolff was at characterization. the people fashioned by her are sharply defined, and emotionally accessible. even if they stay for only a page or two, then sweep on and out of the novel, they are finely rendered. those that stick around for the long haul are even more captivating.
sally otis, is the sun in the solar system of night shift. she's a waitress struggling to support her three children while also taking care of one of her sisters, her brother, another roomer in the house where she has her flat and boards with her, the neighbours across the hall. add the mobster who harrasses her, and the absent husband we eventually meet, and even the absent sister, who swirls again into her life, and you see all orbit around her, all gravitate to her in this book. normally, i wouldn't give two figs about family drama in novel form, but sally is so sweet that i think anyone would want to stick around to see if she makes it through okay because to read sally is to know her, and to believe in her. this is somebody who lives only on the page, and yet i'd trust her more than some of the people who live and breathe around me. sally doesn't forget you even if you are far away; her delight in bringing joy to the people in her life makes you feel proud to know her.
and if sally is the sun, then i guess her sister petey is the moon. petey comes to dominate the second half of the novel. a night club singer, wise in the ways of the world, possessed of an indomitable spirit, and itchy feet, she gets involved with the mobster to distract him from his pursuit of sally and winds up falling in love for the first time with another man of questionable ethics and makes some questionable decisions of her own as a result of the intensity of her feelings.
the novel is very much a slice of life. it tells their stories from point A to point B -- there is some closure for sally and petey and some of the other characters yes, but when we leave them we are keenly aware that they will continue after we are gone. some minor characters, like harold, sally's eldest son, seem to have a whole story that is only alluded to throughout the book, while we follow the two fascinating sisters, and i do sort of wonder why those parts were left in. while i was interested in stories like harold's, it did seem the author's own interest wasn't sustained, the off-shoots didn't seem integral to the novel. had i been her editor, i'm not sure i would've left them in at all. i can't really blame the author for this, and when i think she was only twenty-four when this was published, i'm astounded by the insight she had into humanity, to draw these people so well, so young. i suspect, she, like sally, was possessed of an old soul.
4.5 stars
March 18, 2020
I recently discovered and read all three of the Maritta Wolff novels that my library had, first Whistle Stop, then Sudden Rain, and now Night Shift. I really enjoyed them all, as it is quality of writing that means the most to me, and this author's writing is excellent, with her dialogue being particularly outstanding. I think I liked "Night Shift" best of all. It takes place in 1940 and 41 in a factory town, at first centering on Sally Otis and her children, other relatives, friends, and boarder.
The character Sally is so good that one almost gets tired of her after awhile, but just at that point her sister Petey comes for a visit, and the novel for me became very absorbing. Wolff wrote in the 1950s, and yet she created in Petey a strong, independent, intelligent, complex, extremely noncomformist and quite wonderful character that I'm still thinking about a week after finishing the book. Depicting this character in the button-down misogynist society of the time is really amazing. It's also amazing that as I was born in 1954 in L.A. and fast becoming the bookworm I still am today, Wolff was in the same city writing this well.
The character Sally is so good that one almost gets tired of her after awhile, but just at that point her sister Petey comes for a visit, and the novel for me became very absorbing. Wolff wrote in the 1950s, and yet she created in Petey a strong, independent, intelligent, complex, extremely noncomformist and quite wonderful character that I'm still thinking about a week after finishing the book. Depicting this character in the button-down misogynist society of the time is really amazing. It's also amazing that as I was born in 1954 in L.A. and fast becoming the bookworm I still am today, Wolff was in the same city writing this well.
June 29, 2013
Night Shift is just all around marvelous, tragic, sleazy, grimy, full of despair but also full of heart. At times over the top like a wonderful old B film but it's realistic in a way that makes you hurt for the characters.
September 8, 2017
This is the third book I have read by this author, all books really not in favor right now. They were popular in the era in which they were written. The first novel I read, "Whistle Stop" was a story with characters very real and the mood very clear. Then I read "Sudden Rain", which I did not care for at all. I just completed "Night Shift" and again, I really enjoyed it. The reader really gets the feel of the time, place and characters. Although they have so little, and their lives seem bleak, still they find joy in small things. The ending was a disappointment. Still, I enjoyed her writing in two out of three.
July 28, 2013
A radical departure from the type of novels I would usually read. The book's setting is in Jackson, Michigan right before the onset of U.S. military involvement in World War II. In that respect, it is similar to Whistle Stop which I thoroughly enjoyed. It is the story of three sisters who lead very different lives, the daring adventurous Petey, a night club singer, Sally, the warm, loveable waitress and mother and Virgina, a young, highly impressionable girl trying to find her way in the world.
This is something of a romance novel which I would't normally read. I wanted to learn more about Jackson's bars in that era since my great uncle owned several. They were known as the Kit Kat bars and they were speakeasy bars at one time. I didn't really find what I was looking for in that regard.
Maritta Wolff was a highly acclaimed author in her time. A graduate of U of M, she wrote her first novel while still in college. Her books were re-discovered and re-printed in the early 90's.
This is something of a romance novel which I would't normally read. I wanted to learn more about Jackson's bars in that era since my great uncle owned several. They were known as the Kit Kat bars and they were speakeasy bars at one time. I didn't really find what I was looking for in that regard.
Maritta Wolff was a highly acclaimed author in her time. A graduate of U of M, she wrote her first novel while still in college. Her books were re-discovered and re-printed in the early 90's.
August 28, 2008
If we could have half stars, I'd give this 4.5. I rounded down because I don't think it's a five, it started out a little slow, but it picked up as it went along. Wolff had a real grasp for dialogue and did a brilliant job revealing the motivations of her characters. She is kind of like a female, proto-Elmore Leonard. The plot is minimal, simplistic, and really not that important to the novel. The novel is all about the thoughts and feelings of the characters, and Wolff had some great ones in the book. At 548 pp, it's a little long, but it's certainly worth the read (especially if you don't have much to do while waiting for your job to start!).
June 28, 2010
I picked up this book because it was in the $1.00 bin at Borders. It was written in the early 1940s about the homefront of the US as World War II loomed on the horizon. I thoroughly enjoyed the working-class perspective of a woman trying to hold her extended family together in the face of numerous seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
October 13, 2021
I wasn't prepared to enjoy this as much as I did. Don't think I've read anything from Marietta Wolff before but this will surely not be the last one (pretty sure she had written more). Very compelling and readable story. Quite page turnery without it being a thriller
December 29, 2014
Excellent, just excellent. The contrasting but overlapping lives of three sisters (and a brother). Atmospheric, addictive, amusing, and heartbreaking.
March 25, 2019
Wolff's biggest canvas yet--a sprawling novel of multiple characters in Detroit in the winter of '40-'41--she presents the good, the bad, the ugly with a finish that binds it all together with a flourish.
There's the good: Sally struggles to keep her family of three kids together by working in a restaurant because Roy, her husband, has been committed to a mental hospital after a nervous breakdown. Joe O'Connor lives down the hall in the housing complex; he's unemployed after a work accident disfigured his hands and crippled him to the point of death, also trying to keep his new wife and infant together; and then there's Petey, Sally's sister, who blows into town in the middle of the novel and hires on for the night shift in the ritzy, slinky gambling night club singing with the orchestra. She's a firecracker, a no-nonsense woman who is not afraid to say it loud and bluntly to anyone who will listen to what the exact nature of the problem is. Her story is the center of the book, even though she does appear until much later.
There's the bad: Nicky Toresca, the night club owner, who is slick, smooth, and runs a tight ring. He's is not afraid to order a job on someone from one of his minion workers (esp. John, Sally's brother). He wants what he wants when he wants it. He's mean, steely, and slick.
Then there's the ugly: San, a big oaf of a man, always hatless and wearing a tan gabardine overcoat. Who speaks very little, stoic to the point of brutish, and most egregiously initiates a rape of a young girl (no spoiler here). And the novel ends with Jode, who uses a razor-sharp knife with impunity and rage to slice up his victim (again, no spoiler).
I liked the rawness in this novel. Wolff can never be accused of sugar-coating a story. Her characters are real, tough, flawed, but tenaciously brave. I cannot figure out why Wolff's novels have slipped away from greater readership except to say that other writers must have captured the limelight after World War II (this was her second novel, after Whistlestop, and published in 1942). Nowhere in the book does Wolff make excuses for the mistakes her characters make; she shows them being stupid and misguided just as easily as savvy and tenacious. Stay with this novel to the end, the conclusion has an amazing resolution.
Then there's this, on page 641-2 of my edition: "This was a bad night, Petey thought suddenly with a little shudder, it was an evil night. There was something bad in the way the rain lashed at the earth, there was something bad in the tangible blackness that followed after the cab like a great, soft-footed, clumsy beast. There was a badness in those tentacles of fog that still clung to the marches as if they never would let go. This night could breed unheard-of evil and violence in people. Or was it the other way around, Petey wondered, was it the evil and the violence that people did that crept out from them like a bad odor to tincture the very atmosphere sometimes?" You decide, dear reader, dear philosopher.
One last thing: In 1947, Warner Bros. made a movie starring Ida Lupino as Petey, Robert Alda as Nicky Toresca and music/lyrics by the Gershwin brothers, featuring "The Man I Love," the movie's title. It's a short film that cuts major swathes from Wolff's novel, re-shapes the story to feature the songs and singing and has a film noir finish where Petey slaps John six times, over and over, faster than you can flip a fish to fry on the other side. I don't know what it must have felt like for Wolff to have Hollywood pay her for her movie writes and then slice and re-write it down to a pop hit but it must not have been good. Sure, she got rich though, but hell!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7tdD...
There's the good: Sally struggles to keep her family of three kids together by working in a restaurant because Roy, her husband, has been committed to a mental hospital after a nervous breakdown. Joe O'Connor lives down the hall in the housing complex; he's unemployed after a work accident disfigured his hands and crippled him to the point of death, also trying to keep his new wife and infant together; and then there's Petey, Sally's sister, who blows into town in the middle of the novel and hires on for the night shift in the ritzy, slinky gambling night club singing with the orchestra. She's a firecracker, a no-nonsense woman who is not afraid to say it loud and bluntly to anyone who will listen to what the exact nature of the problem is. Her story is the center of the book, even though she does appear until much later.
There's the bad: Nicky Toresca, the night club owner, who is slick, smooth, and runs a tight ring. He's is not afraid to order a job on someone from one of his minion workers (esp. John, Sally's brother). He wants what he wants when he wants it. He's mean, steely, and slick.
Then there's the ugly: San, a big oaf of a man, always hatless and wearing a tan gabardine overcoat. Who speaks very little, stoic to the point of brutish, and most egregiously initiates a rape of a young girl (no spoiler here). And the novel ends with Jode, who uses a razor-sharp knife with impunity and rage to slice up his victim (again, no spoiler).
I liked the rawness in this novel. Wolff can never be accused of sugar-coating a story. Her characters are real, tough, flawed, but tenaciously brave. I cannot figure out why Wolff's novels have slipped away from greater readership except to say that other writers must have captured the limelight after World War II (this was her second novel, after Whistlestop, and published in 1942). Nowhere in the book does Wolff make excuses for the mistakes her characters make; she shows them being stupid and misguided just as easily as savvy and tenacious. Stay with this novel to the end, the conclusion has an amazing resolution.
Then there's this, on page 641-2 of my edition: "This was a bad night, Petey thought suddenly with a little shudder, it was an evil night. There was something bad in the way the rain lashed at the earth, there was something bad in the tangible blackness that followed after the cab like a great, soft-footed, clumsy beast. There was a badness in those tentacles of fog that still clung to the marches as if they never would let go. This night could breed unheard-of evil and violence in people. Or was it the other way around, Petey wondered, was it the evil and the violence that people did that crept out from them like a bad odor to tincture the very atmosphere sometimes?" You decide, dear reader, dear philosopher.
One last thing: In 1947, Warner Bros. made a movie starring Ida Lupino as Petey, Robert Alda as Nicky Toresca and music/lyrics by the Gershwin brothers, featuring "The Man I Love," the movie's title. It's a short film that cuts major swathes from Wolff's novel, re-shapes the story to feature the songs and singing and has a film noir finish where Petey slaps John six times, over and over, faster than you can flip a fish to fry on the other side. I don't know what it must have felt like for Wolff to have Hollywood pay her for her movie writes and then slice and re-write it down to a pop hit but it must not have been good. Sure, she got rich though, but hell!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7tdD...
November 17, 2019
🐌 read for me. Once I got mid-way into the story, more characters were fleshed-out and their journeys within the story began to flow. Can't say I can relate but the small town working families' history kept the 📖 interesting.
Want to read
November 4, 2025The Man I Love (1947)
December 22, 2021
This was one of those odd hardbacks I found at a flea market in Oslo, I think it might even be a first edition - anyway, I bought a lot of books a year or so ago, just a few krone each, just based on the date and the opening paragraph; many of these I haven't read, but this one, it's bulky 660 page mass kept shouting out to me from the shelf and, after a quick check of the author's history on wikipedia, it sounded like a decent enough read.
From what I expected this looked like being a no-holds-barred, brutal melodrama and, maybe it didn't quite shock now the way it may have done 70 years ago, but it was, nevertheless, high on drama. Whilst Wolff's writing isn't as divine as, say, Steinbeck's or as intellectual as Mary McCarthy, she does have a knack of writing superb characterisations, the Braun family are as thoroughly interesting as they are disparate.
In spite of its length, and the domesticity of much of the novel (this is essentially a gritty working class tale) the plot keeps moving and the flash of glamour developed through chanteuse Petey makes for a very enjoyable read. Yes, the dialogue often feels ripped straight from a B movie (a film version was developed through Warners, with Ida Lupino as the mouthy Petey Braun) that's not to say that the subject matter (from poverty to mental illness to adultery, rape and, ultimately, brutal murder) is predictable or clumsily presented, Wolff pushes the boundaries of the day, if not with her literary prowess, but certainly as far as melodrama and atmosphere are concerned; the reader easily and delightfully transported to some cinematic film-noir world.
http://favourite-colours.blogspot.no/...
From what I expected this looked like being a no-holds-barred, brutal melodrama and, maybe it didn't quite shock now the way it may have done 70 years ago, but it was, nevertheless, high on drama. Whilst Wolff's writing isn't as divine as, say, Steinbeck's or as intellectual as Mary McCarthy, she does have a knack of writing superb characterisations, the Braun family are as thoroughly interesting as they are disparate.
In spite of its length, and the domesticity of much of the novel (this is essentially a gritty working class tale) the plot keeps moving and the flash of glamour developed through chanteuse Petey makes for a very enjoyable read. Yes, the dialogue often feels ripped straight from a B movie (a film version was developed through Warners, with Ida Lupino as the mouthy Petey Braun) that's not to say that the subject matter (from poverty to mental illness to adultery, rape and, ultimately, brutal murder) is predictable or clumsily presented, Wolff pushes the boundaries of the day, if not with her literary prowess, but certainly as far as melodrama and atmosphere are concerned; the reader easily and delightfully transported to some cinematic film-noir world.
http://favourite-colours.blogspot.no/...
June 5, 2012
Just spent some time typing up a review that was swallowed by the GR maintenance downtime.
Summary: good writing, bad use of multiple perspectives, lack of resolution for many of the MANY characters (large family + neighbours + tenant + random people in the small town). The book is 500+ pages, so it felt like I had invested in the lives of some people only to have them vaporise from our common space. It also bothered me that Wolff took the idea of 'every-town' America to the extent that I didn't really know where everything was set.
There was a bit of an Irish feel to the whole big-family-with-broken-parts plot.
Summary: good writing, bad use of multiple perspectives, lack of resolution for many of the MANY characters (large family + neighbours + tenant + random people in the small town). The book is 500+ pages, so it felt like I had invested in the lives of some people only to have them vaporise from our common space. It also bothered me that Wolff took the idea of 'every-town' America to the extent that I didn't really know where everything was set.
There was a bit of an Irish feel to the whole big-family-with-broken-parts plot.
March 17, 2008
i read this book because i saw it at borders and i thought the cover looked cool. it wasn't terrible, but the story was kind of all over the place and i don't really know if i could even say what it was all about, in the end.
November 2, 2016
Needed an editor.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews