He began to compose original material for radio drama and acted professionally with the Mae Desmond Stock Company, the Theatre Guild, and, in 1930, the Group Theatre. Odets could not make a living from the theater, and he returned home for a period, then moved to Manhattan and stayed in a series of cheap furnished rooms. That milieu exposed Odets to the language, personalities, and experiences of people struggling to survive and salvage some dignity during the Depression's first years, all of which he used in his early plays.
Odets began to write more ambitious dramatic pieces. In 1933, under the working title "I Got the Blues", he completed a full-length play about an embattled Jewish family; in 1934 Waiting for Lefty won the New Theatre League-New Masses playwriting contest. That same year Odets joined the Communist party, which he abandoned after eight months. In 1935, when "I Got the Blues" was retitled Awake and Sing! and produced on Broadway, Odets became an overnight sensation, but that same year his Paradise Lost was a failure. Odets regained his reputation in 1937 with the production of Golden Boy, the most successful play in the Group Theatre's history.
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