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,...
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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,...
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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, hi...
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In the following article, Odets defends his technique of constructing plays without plots.
No one will deny that all over the world today life is changing for better or worse for millions of human bei...
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The following was originally presented as a conference paper in 1963. Mendelsohn views Odets' social and personal beliefs in the context of his early plays.
Early in Clifford Odets' 1949...
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In the excerpt below, Rabkin examines Odets' incorporation of elements of agitprop into his writings of the 1930s.
Clifford Odets scrawled his name across the page marked 1935 in American drama...
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Critical Essay by Grenville Vernon
In all that has been written about the plays of Clifford Odets it is odd that little attention has been paid to the fact that first and foremost these plays are Jewi...
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Critical Essay by Stark Young
Mr. Odets' "Night Music" has been generally taken, in so far as I have read comments on it, as a sort of Manhattan "Boy Meets Girl," th...
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Critical Essay by David Burnham
Hollywood has been generally blamed for Clifford Odets's failure to live up to the promise of "Awake and Sing" and "Waiting for Lefty....
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Critical Essay by Harold Clurman
Odets's work from the beginning contained "a protest that is also prophecy." There was in it a fervor that derived from the hope and expectation o...
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Critical Essay by Stark Young
As an active figure, conducive to sweat, clapping and partisanship, Mr. Odets may be in a short time an impressive dramatist. Already, without appearing to be middle-clas...
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Critical Essay by Richard Hayes
Mr. Clifford Odets' ["The Flowering Peach"] is a work of secular piety, imperfect and somewhat arid, but nonetheless, luminously touched with the i...
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Critical Essay by Gerald Weales
[In The Flowering Peach it] was Odets's apparent decision to make of the Biblical story a modern Jewish folk play…. The pattern of Noah's family is...
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Critical Essay by Mary Mccarthy
Golden Boy again demonstrates the lesson of the Odets' Paradise Lost: that this author appears to be psychically glued to the material of his first play. He cann...
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Critical Essay by Stanley Kauffmann
Odets's new film, in terms of its script, lives up to its advance defense; it is not a prostituted work. But the author has stoutly defended the wrong portal...
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Critical Essay by Edward Murray
The structure of Odets' plays has been misinterpreted. To some extent the playwright himself is responsible for this critical confusion. "I was influenced...
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Critical Essay by Allan Lewis
The most acclaimed writer of the thirties was Clifford Odets. He rose out of the Depression to give voice to a world in crisis. He put the Bronx Jewish middle class on st...
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Critical Essay by Gerald Weales
Mr. Bonaparte was wrong and so was Marion Castle. No man is so simply made that he has a single nature which a wrong turn can violate. The violation, too, is in his nat...
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Critical Essay by Grenville Vernon
In ["Awake and Sing"] Mr. Odets showed a keen sense of dramatic values and for a young playwright an unusual mastery of theatrical technique; but far m...
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Critical Essay by Joseph Wood Krutch
Clifford Odets was given every encouragement to let himself go. Unfortunately he chose to be as little critical of his work as his admirers had been, and the resul...
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Critical Essay by Edith J. R. Isaacs
Paradise Lost is not a great play, as the Group thinks it is. But it is without doubt an important play because in material and method it marks the fresh, swift ad...
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Critical Essay by Kenneth Burke
After having been led, by the explicitly formulated objections of some dissenters, to expect that I would dislike Odets' "Paradise Lost," I finally...
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Cantor is an American educator, editor, and non-fiction author. In the following essay, he examines Odets's use of Yinglish—a blend of Yiddish and English language—and its importa...
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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...
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Groman is an American educator, editor, and author. In the following essay, he examines the influence of music on Odets and his works. He finds that Odets's plays often equate music with an inn...
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In the following essay, Peary explores Odets's flirtation with and eventual immersion into Hollywood screenwriting.
Consider three contemporary playwrights. Sam Shepard becomes a movie star, a ...
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In the following excerpt, Denby reviews The Time is Ripe: The 1940 Journal of Clifford Odets, and comments on Odets's personal revelations at the beginning of a career slide.
Clifford Odets, [E...
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In the following essay, Groman examines Odets's reverence for the inspired creativity of Victor Hugo, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Ludwig van Beethoven. Groman then contrasts the high...
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John Lahr is an American author of both fiction and nonfiction, a playwright, and a critic. In the following excerpt, he reviews a 1992 performance of The Flowering Peach and gives background on the p...
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Mendelsohn is an American educator, author, and critic. In the following interview conducted shortly before Odets's death, Odets comments on a wide range of topics, including theater, his influ...
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In the following essay, Mendelsohn traces a chronological progression in Odets's plays—from an early emphasis on anti-family social rebellion to a later integration and acceptance of the...
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Hughes was an American playwright, editor, and critic. On the occasion of Odets's death, Hughes examines his reputation as a promising playwright who sold out to Hollywood.
"What did I ...
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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 Stra...
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Weiner is a playwright and a former student and acquaintance of Odets. In the following essay, he uses his familiarity with Odets and his works to offer insight into Odets's controversial caree...
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In the following excerpt, Miller discusses Odets's Till the Day I Die and places it within the social and political contexts of its day.
Between the time of the October Revolution and the Stali...
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Appel was an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and one-time student of Odets. In the following essay, he relates his personal experience with Odets and discusses Odets's role at the ...
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Clifford Odets
Clifford Odets
