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 is known primarily as a proletarian playwright of the 1930s, although this label is misleading. Odets's first few plays, which catapulted him virtually overnight to fame and affluence, reflect the experience of the Great Depression and...

Born in Philadelphia to Louis J. and Pearl Geisinger Odets, Clifford Odets grew up in a Jewish section of the Bronx. Though Odets at times suggested that he was raised under the shadows of poverty, his father became a prosperous businessman in the...

Clifford Odets IF CLIFFORD ODETS WAS AN OVERVALUED PLAYWRIGHT in the thirties, he was soon to become undervalued. By the fifties his plays were seen not only as old-fashioned but outright dangerous, since he had been a Communist. The sixties, radical though they...

Actress Joanne Woodward, who has been trying her hand at directing, recently mounted two plays by playwright Clifford Odets. The first play, the 1937 boxing drama 'The Golden Boy,' was directed by Woodward for the New York City-based Blue Light Theater Company in Nov....

Lincoln Center’s rediscovery of Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing! is a great opportunity to see the 1935 play that transformed American theater. But whether the drama about a Jewish family struggling in the Bronx to survive the Depression lives up to its myth as...

Lincoln Center’s rediscovery of Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing! is a great opportunity to see the 1935 play that transformed American theater. But whether the drama about a Jewish family struggling in the Bronx to survive the Depression lives up to its myth as a...

In the excerpt below, Rabkin examines Odets' incorporation of elements of agitprop into his writings of the 1930s.

Shuman is an American biographer, editor, and educator. In the following essay, he explores Odets's personal background and relates Odets's upbringing to the Jewish character of his work. He locates in Odets's plays several distinctly Jewish subjects, including Jewish mothers, exile and alienation, redemption, and idiomatic expression.

In the following essay, drawn from a September 1961 interview, Odets recounts his genesis and progression as a playwright, with particular focus on his early days with the Group Theatre under Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman.