Odets, Clifford

ODETS, CLIFFORD (1906–1963). The most successful Left playwright of the 1930s, Clifford Odets was born to Lithuanian Jewish parents and raised in New York City. Abandoning high school in his third year, Clifford dreamed of becoming a poet. He did not turn to the theater until 1928, when he began acting with the Theatre Guild and was inspired by the work of John Howard Lawson. In 1933, Odets began writing plays, his first—Awake and Sing!—produced by the Group Theatre in 1935. That same year he wrote in three days his one-act play Waiting for Lefty, which won the New York Theatre League contest and brought him to the attention of the theater public. Widely performed as Left theater (sometimes by local union groups) across the United States in the next several years, this labor play (with its actors chanting “STRIKE, STRIKE, STRIKE!” at the conclusion) took its inspiration from a New York taxi strike of 1934.

Odets joined the Communist Party in 1935 and visited Cuba to study the political situation there. He was arrested by the authorities as a Communist. Returning to the United States, he finished three works that would be hits in 1936: Till the Day I Die, Awake and Sing!, and Paradise Lost. Almost single-handedly, Odets made radical theater a paying concern in New York City, and a prime medium for political expression. He also began work in Hollywood, where he could earn $2,500 a week. His first filmed script, The General Died at Dawn (1936), prompted the oft-quoted barb, “Odets, where is thy sting?”

Driven by his need for public acclaim and simultaneously haunted by self-doubts at the cost of his success, Odets returned to Broadway with Golden Boy (1937) and Rocket to the Moon (1938). Both were critical and popular hits. For the first time, a playwright had brought the Jewish experience to the English-language American stage. Audiences were moved by a rich household vernacular that was permeated with a stark assessment of capitalism’s ravages upon the spirit, and no less with a lyrical yearning for a better world. Critics consider these his finest works.

But Odets increasingly felt a sense of futility and self-betrayal in his work, with Hollywood as a metaphor of corruption. In 1952 he appeared as a friendly witness for the House Un-American Activities Committee. This destroyed his credibility as a radical, and on his deathbed Odets swore that it had ruined his later life. Evidently, Odets needed Left culture for personal self-worth and as an artistic well-spring. Harold Clurman described Odets’s work as a confession of personal anguish “at sharing those values in our civilization that he despised.” One of his last serious plays, The Big Knife (1949), featured a protagonist who had gone from idealism to cynicism, desperation, and finally suicide. The only play to be produced after his testimony, The Flowering Peach, was a folksy retelling of the Noah’s Ark legend.

Brenman-Gibson, Margaret. Clifford Odets: American Playwright. New York: Atheneum, 1982.

Miller, Gabriel, ed. Critical Essays on Clifford Odets. New York: Macmillan, 1991.

Murray, Edward. Clifford Odets: The Thirties and After. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1968.

Williams, Jay. Stage Left. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974.

Clifford Odets Papers, 1937-1965. Finding Aid. Columbia University Libraries Archival Collections. https://findingaids.library.columbia.edu/ead/nnc-rb/ldpd_9746888

Clifford Odets Papers, 1937-1965. Collection Overview. Archives & Manuscripts. New York Public Library. http://archives.nypl.org/the/21250