Clifford Odets
July 18, 1906 — Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Clifford Odets was an American playwright who emerged from the left-wing Group Theatre in the 1930s to become the most electrifying new voice on the American stage, writing plays that channelled the desperation of the Great Depression into furious, lyrical dramas about working-class life, family loyalty, and the corrosion of idealism by compromise.
The Group Theatre and a Sudden Fame
Born on July 18, 1906 in Philadelphia, Odets grew up in the Bronx and left school at fifteen to become an actor. He found his calling and his community in 1931 when he joined the Group Theatre — the collective founded by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford that introduced the Stanislavski acting method to America and committed itself to socially engaged theatre. Odets was a minor actor in the Group's early productions, but it was as a writer that he transformed American drama. In January 1935, the Group staged a one-act play he had written in three days: Waiting for Lefty, a drama about a taxi drivers' strike, performed in the round with the audience as the union meeting. The premiere ended with the audience, on its feet, shouting "Strike! Strike!" along with the cast — one of the most celebrated moments of political theatre in American history.
Awake and Sing! and the Voice of a Generation
That same season, the Group staged Awake and Sing!, a full-length drama about a Jewish family in the Bronx crushed between economic desperation and private dreams. The play's language — dense with Yiddish cadences, street slang, and a kind of anguished poetry specific to urban immigrant life — was unlike anything on the American stage before it. Overnight, Odets became famous. Time magazine put him on its cover. He was called the voice of the 1930s, the playwright of the dispossessed. In 1935 alone he had four plays running on Broadway simultaneously. His subsequent work included Golden Boy (1937), about a violinist who becomes a boxer and loses his soul, and Rocket to the Moon (1938). The tension in all his work — between art and money, integrity and success, personal desire and collective obligation — mirrored the contradictions of his own life.
Did You Know?
Odets moved to Hollywood in the late 1930s and became a well-paid screenwriter — a fact he experienced as a form of failure and betrayal. Many of his plays dramatise exactly this choice: the artist who sells out for comfort and money. When he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1952, he named names — identifying former Communist Party members — a decision that cost him many friendships and that he spent the rest of his life rationalising. Arthur Miller, who refused to name names, later wrote that Odets's testimony was one of the great disappointments of his life.
Hollywood, HUAC, and a Diminished Legacy
After his HUAC testimony in 1952, Odets continued writing for film and television — he was working on a television anthology series when he died of stomach cancer on August 14, 1963, in Los Angeles, aged 57. His late play The Country Girl (1950) became a successful film starring Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby. But the burning political urgency of his early work was gone. He is remembered above all for what he represented in the 1930s: the possibility that the American theatre could be a place of genuine social power, and for plays like Awake and Sing! that gave voice, with great beauty, to people the stage had previously ignored.