Clifford Odets

A playwright, film scenarist, and director, Clifford Odets (1906-1963) was America's outstanding dramatist in the 1930s. His colloquial dialogue, vital ideological protests on behalf of human dignity, and feeling for the family were distinctive.

Clifford Odets was born on July 18, 1906, in Philadelphia, Pa. The family moved in 1912 to New York, where his father became a successful businessman.

In spite of his upbringing with his two sisters in a comfortable, middle-class, Jewish home, Odets was a melancholy child. His formal education ended after 2 years of high school. During most of the 1920s he acted with small theater groups and held various positions in radio stations, joining the Group Theater in 1930. Reportedly, he attempted suicide three times before the age of 25.

The theatrical approach of the Group Theater transformed Odets from a poor actor into a good playwright. While with the Group, he also joined the Communist party. As a result of his sensational writing debut in 1935, he received many offers from Hollywood. In 1937 he married the actress Luise Rainer.

Writings of the Thirties

Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing, Till the Day I Die, and Paradise Lost, all produced in 1935, quickly established Odets as a powerful dramatist. Waiting for Lefty, framed within a union meeting, is a series of indignant vignettes. Although the play has been criticized for simplistic views and characterizations, its raw power and anger are notable. Concerned with a family in the Bronx, Awake and Sing pinpoints the impact of the capitalistic economic structure on the people within it and the fraudulency involved in adjusting human lives to economic forces; the characterizations and use of symbols are well done. Till the Day I Die deals with conflict between Nazis and Communists. Paradise Lost focuses on the bewilderment of a middle-class family as their values shift in relation to changing social forces. Viewed as a realistic work, it is unsatisfactory; assessed symbolically, it is more convincing.

After Paradise Lost, Odets wrote the film adaptation of The General Died at Dawn. His next stage play, Golden Boy (1937), proved his most popular success. In selecting a career in boxing instead of in music, Joe Bonaparte goes against his nature; he becomes successful but destroys himself. Although Golden Boy contains social observations, its orientation is toward individuals rather than politics. (In 1964 it was made into a Broadway musical.) Rocket to the Moon (1938) deals with loneliness and the need for love, noting how conditions within and outside man impede attaining love.

Hollywood Years

When the Group Theater dissolved in 1941, it had produced seven of Odets's plays. That year, following his divorce, Odets returned to Hollywood to write and direct films. In quick succession he wrote Humoresque (1942), None but the Lonely Heart (1943), and Deadline at Dawn (1944).

In 1943 Odets married another actress, Betty Grayson; they had two children. In addition to his constant screen obligations (including more than 15 scenarios), he continued to write for the stage. In 1952 he was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities because of his earlier Communist affiliations; his performance did little to enhance his personal reputation.

Odets's wife died in 1954. He started several plays after that but failed to complete them. His last film, Wild in the Country (1961), starred Elvis Presley. At the time of his death in Los Angeles on Aug. 14, 1963, Odets was working on a dramatic series for television.

Later Writings

The burning concern for poor workers that propelled Odets's early success became, ironically, something of an albatross. Though he had changed from his propagandistic style as early as Golden Boy and never really returned to extreme political postures in later plays, many critics had trouble accepting him on his new terms. Further, since he had initially championed the poor, his remunerative employment in Hollywood stirred insinuations that he lacked artistic integrity. Thus evaluations of his later writings are occasionally less objective than one might hope.

Night Music (1940), although realistic, has a strong poetic component. Steve Takis's loneliness and frustration have some socioeconomic aspects, but Odets's hand is uncertain. There is confusion in treating the subject and an imperfect development of structure. Clash by Night (1941) is a standard treatment of the eternal love triangle to which Odets adds nothing important. Pessimism permeates the work, and there is little hope either by an individual for himself or for understanding between people. Odets felt that his plays were always concerned with "the struggle not to have life nullified by circumstances, false values, anything." The Big Knife (1949), showing the annihilation of a Hollywood star, focuses on personal integrity in combat with practical necessity and perhaps displays something of Odets's own dilemma. His increasing craftsmanship, noted in The Big Knife, is clearly evident in The Country Girl (1950). The portraits of the alcoholic actor Frank Elgin and his confused wife are very effective. A fine piece of theater, the play shows Odets deeply involved in human psychology. The Flowering Peach (1954), his last produced play, is Odets at his mature best. His examination of the biblical Noah concentrates on the family, this time with an increased awareness of and tolerance for man's imperfections.

Further Reading

Two works on Odets contain biographical material and criticism of the plays: R. Baird Shuman, Clifford Odets (1962), and Edward Murray, Clifford Odets: The Thirties and After (1968). Among the many critical studies with material on Odets are Anita Block, The Changing World in Plays and Theatre (1939); Harold Clurman, The Fervent Years: The Story of the Group Theatre and the Thirties (1945); Eric Bentley, The Playwright as Thinker: A Study of Drama in Modern Times (1946); and Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left (1961).

Additional Sources

Brenman-Gibson, Margaret, Clifford Odets, American playwright: the years from 1906 to 1940, New York: Atheneum, 1981.

Weales, Gerald Clifford, Odets, the playwright, London; New York: Methuen, 1985. □

Odets, Clifford (1906–63),born in Philadelphia and reared in the Bronx, quit school at 15 to become an actor. After acting with the Theatre Guild, he became a founder of the Group Theatre (1931), and was catapulted to fame by its production of his one‐act play Waiting for Lefty (1935), dealing with a taxi strike. This success was followed by the production of Awake and Sing (1935) and the one‐act play Till the Day I Die (1935), about the struggle of the German Communists at the beginning of the Hitler regime. These plays brought Odets a reputation as the leading proletarian playwright at the time, although he was less concerned with the problems of the worker than with the “fraud” of middle‐class civilization, deprived by its economic insecurity of its former status and becoming aware that most of its cherished ideals no longer correspond to realities. Further realistic plays written for the Group are Paradise Lost (1935); Golden Boy (1937; revised as a musical, 1964), about a young Italian‐American violinist whose desire for wealth and fame leads him to become a pugilist, and who dies in an automobile crash, having attempted to find an escape in speed from the loss of his inner security; Rocket to the Moon (1938), portraying a Bronx dentist who attempts to find happiness in a belated love affair, but fails because his will has been vitiated by the meanness of his past life; Night Music (1940), the love story of a lower‐middle‐class couple in New York; and Clash by Night (1941), a love “triangle.” Later plays, infrequent because of motion‐picture work, are The Big Knife (1948), about an idealistic actor corrupted by money easily earned from motion pictures; The Country Girl (1950), about an alcoholic actor's marriage; and The Flowering Peach (1954), a retelling of the Noah tale.

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.

Clifford Odets , 1906–63, American dramatist, b. Philadelphia. After graduating from high school he became an actor and in 1931 joined the Group Theatre . Turning his attention from acting to playwriting, Odets soon came to be regarded as the most gifted of the American naturalistic social-protest dramatists of the 1930s. His first work for the Group, Waiting for Lefty (1935), a vernacular, Marxian drama of the awakening and insurgency of the impoverished working classes, aroused immediate international attention. Awake and Sing (1935), his first full-length play and widely considered his best work, compassionately portrays the struggles and rebellion of a financially destitute Jewish-American family. Other plays include Till the Day I Die (1935), Paradise Lost (1935), Golden Boy (1937), Night Music (1939), and Clash by Night (1942). Odets spent many years in Hollywood writing film scripts, e.g., Sweet Smell of Success (1957). In his later plays he turned from social drama to self-conscious dramas of the individual, such as The Big Knife (1949), The Country Girl (1950), and The Flowering Peach (1954).

Bibliography: See The Time is Ripe: The 1940 Journal of Clifford Odets (1988); biographies by E. Murray (1968), G. C. Weales (1971), G. Miller (1989), and M. Brenman-Gibson (2002); studies by M. J. Mendelsohn (1969), H. Cantor (1978, repr. 2000), G. Miller, ed. (1991), and C. J. Herr (2003).

Odets, Clifford (1906–63), American dramatist, was a founder member in 1931 of the Group Theatre, which followed the naturalistic methods of the Moscow Art Theatre, and his reputation was made when it performed his short play Waiting for Lefty (1935), about a taxi-drivers' strike. This was followed in the same year by two other dramas of social conflict, Till the Day I Die, and Awake and Sing! Later works include Clash By Night (1941); The Big Knife (1948); and The Country Girl (1950, first known in Britain as Winter Journey), about an alcoholic actor's marriage.

Odets, Clifford (1906–63) US social protest dramatist. He helped to organize the Group Theatre in 1931. His plays include Awake and Sing (1935), Waiting for Lefty (1935) and Golden Boy (1937). He later moved to Hollywood, where he wrote and directed films including The Country Girl (1950).