Odets, Clifford

Odets, Clifford (1906–63), playwright. The leading dramatist of left‐wing social protest in the 1930s, he was born in Philadelphia but raised in New York. His earliest professional work in the theatre was as an actor, including several seasons with the Group Theatre, whose theories of drama and staging he shared. When the Group mounted a special benefit performance of his explosive one‐act play about a taxi drivers' union strike, Waiting for Lefty, its reception made him famous overnight. However, before the troupe brought the play to Broadway, it first produced his landmark domestic drama Awake and Sing! (1935). A confused indictment of the emptiness of the middle class, Paradise Lost (1935) was so coldly received that Odets temporarily abandoned Broadway for Hollywood. On his return he offered what many have considered his best play, Golden Boy (1937). But a falling away of his dramatic abilities became evident with Rocket to the Moon (1938), Night Music (1940), and Clash by Night (1941). Eight years passed before Odets returned to Broadway with a highly colored attack on Hollywood, The Big Knife (1949). His last two plays suggested that the dramatist could still recover some of his earlier sureness: the backstage drama The Country Girl (1950) and the lighthearted Biblical Noah play The Flowering Peach (1954). At his best Odets was a powerful dramatist with a gift for sympathetic, memorable characterization, but his frequent rejections and returns to Broadway hint that his approach to writing was beset by the very conflict between commercialism and preachy idealism that was the essence of many of his works. Biography: Clifford Odets—American Playwright, Margaret Brenman‐Gibson, 1982.