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Home , Clash by Night (play), Clifford Odets, Golden Boy (play), Harold Clurman, Jane Wyman, Night Music (play)

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OUR DEBT TO ODETS: AND THE THEATRE OF THE ‘30s

Robert Skloot University of Wisconsin-Madison

The commemorations of the centennial year of Clifford Odets’ birth, of which this paper may be the last example, have seen a number of events that restore, perhaps only temporarily, his name to the list of historically important American playwrights. There can’t be, of course, any guarantee that a playwright’s work will live on after death, and artistic graveyards are full of plays and novels, symphonies and landscapes that once had received both attention and predictions of eternal success. It is the critic’s job to visit and explore these cemeteries (in which, as in all such places, history can be found and interpreted) to see if the digging up of bones might reveal either a premature burial or something asleep and requiring an awakening. In the preface to the publication of his first six plays Odets himself commended his work thus: “My belief...is that the plays will say whatever is to be said; most of them have bones in them and will stand up unsupported.” (Odets, ix)

The central question attached to the centennial commemoration is this: what are we to make of Clifford Odets’ plays, that work for which he will be remembered, early in the 21st century? and do they yet contain some things of interest to us seven decades on? It’s probably no surprise that I’ll provide an affirmative answer, and I’ll attempt to assess his work from a perspective I think will be both revealing and useful in advocating for Odets’ rehabilitation beyond the commemorative proceedings of which this talk is one small, belated contribution.

Curiously, coming upon Odets today involves the close reading of bones, in this case celebrity obituaries. Jane Wyman, who died late last year at 96 acted in the 1940 Odets play ; , dead at 86 last year became an actor after reading and acted in the 1952 revival of that Odets himself directed. Both and , actresses who passed away in 2004 were connected to Odets, the former as one of the many women he slept with and abandoned, and the latter who won a Tony for playing the title role of The Country Girl in 1950, the same Odets role that won the Academy Award for in 1955, a fact mentioned by the cultural critic Stanley Fish in his New York Times blog a few months ago.

A crucial biographical fact of Odets’ beginnings is a place to start this discussion: he was the second-generation product of an immigrant experience. Odets was born in 1906, the son of Jews who were mostly ambivalent toward their religion but sympathetic to their “old world” culture as can be heard in the distinctive Yiddish inflections of his colorful best dialog. As countless books, plays and films have told us, this was a time of massive settlement into the promised land, “promised” because America, freedom’s land, held the promise of advancement and wealth through hard work. Many, of course, had already redeemed the promise by the time Odets’s parents Pearl and Lou appeared on the streets of Philadelphia. Following in the tradition that a new country needed a new name, Clifford’s family name Gorodetsky would be chopped

2 at both ends, “like a herring in a Greek salad” as Moe says about Hennie Berger in Awake and Sing!, though the persona he assumed rejected being a man of the middle. Odets’s adolescence occurred in a time of economic success for many of America’s new citizens...and not just because you had the right connections and the right skin color to take advantage of the best schools and the right neighborhoods.

He came of the newly-arrived middle-class. His abusive, vindictive and overbearing father had climbed from instability and want to financial success in a printing business. His mother, small and delicate, spent her whole married life terrorized by L.J. (the “J” had no meaning, but was added to give Lou a name with more heft and substance) died early at 47. Clifford, oldest of three children, was a terrible student, excelling at nothing in his short high school career except public speaking. He existed mostly unhappily in a family that shamed him for his perceived weakness and rejected his need for love. Filled with insecurity and resentment, he came to see his personal unhappiness as somehow attached to the national insecurity that would soon settle upon the land. All his work, writes Odets’ biographer Margaret Brenman-Gibson, reveals “the deeper struggle born of his own family but inseparable from the larger sweep of developing history.” (249). At age 23 in 1929, when the bottom fell out of America and the world, Odets, whose employment was reduced to performing bit acting roles and memorized poems at theatres and on radio, was desperate to find the best and right fit for his talents; he found it as a member of another kind of family, a theatre family, and one that achieved notoriety in its time as the voice of artistic revolution. The year was 1931.

If you were alive in the thirties and attuned to the cultural developments of the day, you could hardly have avoided the passionate argument surrounding the place of the arts in the country’s distressed economy. Remember, it was a time of massive upheaval of a kind not seen before or since, a time of two overriding fears: that American society was on the verge of collapse, and that fascism’s conquest was at hand at home and abroad. Under President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, specifically the WPA (Works Progress Administration), the arts became part of the effort to break the back of the Depression. Thus, you could not have avoided hearing of the Group Theatre and other companies like it, and the excitement it brought to those heady and beleaguered times. In the words of one historian: “The work of the major dramatists of the period...unquestionably reflects an intense, active concern with the political and social issues raised by the Depression and the rise of fascism.” (Rabkin, 28) That remarkable confluence of history and artistic energy is a story told often, and I’ll be brief in my description of it.

It was two years after the market’s crash that three visionaries came together to establish a new kind of theatre for America. , (both Jewish) and founded a company of artists who sought to change what America was: impoverished, depressed, and adrift, for something better: more communal, more secure, more just. Weales quotes Clurman, the intellectual leader of the triumvirate, as finding in the Group: “Here was companionship, security, work, and dreams.” (Clifford Odets, 29). Of the arts, the theatre was to be the first among equals in the turbulent politics of the day. Odets signed on as an actor, though he never

3 impressed anyone with his abilities, in fact quite the opposite. In any case, he was up against the toughest competition of his or any day, as the original cast of Golden Boy attests: , , Lee J. Cobb, Jules (later John) Garfield, (at 29, the oldest of the original actors), , Robert “Bobby” Lewis, Karl Malden who had the smallest and most hysterical of roles at the very end, and lastly, , nicknamed “Gadge,” America’s most heralded and influential stage and film director whose autobiography is one of the most readable and important chronicles of these troubled times.

It was in January, 1935, with the writing of a play as an entry into a contest sponsored by a left-wing magazine, that Odets was truly catapulted into a fame that, when the truth was retrospectively known, he would spend the rest of his life trying to recapture. The play was Waiting for Lefty, and it was followed in quick succession by Awake and Sing!, and , a year’s work on which his reputation, then and now, would largely be based. We speak today of a career cresting too quickly, and perhaps that was the case with Odets, but for the moment he was, depending on whom you read: the voice of the new age, the visionary/savior of America from its complacent, rotten middle-classness, or just “poet of the Jewish middle class.” (Warshow, 22) Gerald Weales sums up: “Odets is so identified with the 1930s that a mention of his name elicits stock responses, the recollection of a time when literature was a weapon and leftist optimism almost mandatory.” (Clifford Odets, 15)

It’s important to remember that Odets was not the only playwright of his generation, or even of this decade that began so badly in October, 1929. Near the end of the 30s decade, in December, 1938, Time magazine put Odets’ photo on its cover with the caption “Down with the general Fraud!” But an irony emerges when we know that the biggest song hit of 1938 was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and the best selling book for two years running was Gone With the Wind. Perhaps even more interesting was the play that won the Pulitzer Prize that year, a script that has outlived all of the plays of its time, Odets’ included: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.

Wilder’s play represents, I believe, a theatrical achievement completely opposed to Odets’ work and what he hoped the theatre could accomplish. Wilder’s text is the product of gentile affability, a platonic valentine to small and satisfying pleasures that reveal an eternal trajectory to life, a life that is good and true (even if disappointing) because it subsumes the individual and her achievements and disappointments in the cyclical recurrence of life’s details, like the ticking clocks, Mama’s sunflowers and newly-ironed dresses Emily Webb mentions plaintively at the end of Our Town. Wilder’s world is, in fact, another version of the American experience, one that is entirely different and just as valid as Odets’ American vision of ethnically inflected individual struggle against social and political forces of mendacious, life-denying authority. His type of play, or at least his first great success, was called by critics agitprop, and the name says it all.

Odets’ political affinities, like those of his compatriots in the Group Theatre, were unmistakably leftist, and his brief membership in the Communist Party in 1934,

4 like that of his artistic colleagues, represented an unmistakable attraction to a political collective. At the same time, its connection to the belief in the strength of the individual, so eminently American, produces an uneasy tension between the one versus the many that is a feature of the political activity in the American 1930s. It provided Odets’ plays with an energy both ideological and rhetorical, and a contradiction both challenging and exhausting. It also involved a defining feature of Odets’ writing that, is of crucial importance to understanding his entire work: the connected themes of economic subjugation and personal betrayal.

One of the great stories of the American theatre concerns the premiere of Waiting for Lefty on Sunday night, , 1935. The Group had been founded four years earlier, and had a record of occasional success as well as definite failure. Financial losses had brought it close to bankruptcy, and the end was near. The one-act play deals with a union of taxi cab drivers in Philadelphia who are deciding whether to strike against the company that is slowly starving them. They are meeting in a smoky union hall and waiting for the arrival of Lefty who will provide them with information that will determine their actions. The villain is named Harry Fatt, a cartoon figure of the crooked union boss who is really a tool of management selling out the drivers’ demand for a living age. The play has five short scenes, all of them dealing in some way with betrayal and acted by the desperate drivers.

At the end, with Fatt’s thugs threatening them, the men receive the news that Lefty has been shot dead behind the car barn. Agate, one of the drivers, rallies them:

Hear it, boys, hear it? Hell, listen to me! Coast to coast! HELLO AMERICA! HELLO. WE’RE STORM BIRDS OF THE WORKING CLASS. WORKERS OF THE WORLD....OUR BONES AND BLOOD! And when we die they’ll know what we did to make a new world! Christ, cut us up to little pieces. We’ll die for what is right! Put fruit trees where our ashes are! (To audience): Well, what’s the answer?

Then, all the drivers rise as one and shout “Strike! Strike!” and at that moment so did the audience. Some of the actors were sitting among the audience in the house, and when they rose to voice their decision on cue the emotional power was overwhelming. There is a famous photograph of Kazan standing on stage with arms raised in the final moments of the performance, and, as he recollected thereafter, there were 28 curtain calls, taking up almost as much time as the entire performance...it was a moment unlike any he experienced before or after. Here is how Clurman described the event and what it meant.

When the audience at the end of the play responded to the militant question from the stage: ‘Well, what’s the answer?’ with a spontaneous roar of ‘Strike! Strike!’ it was something more than a tribute to the play’s effectiveness, more even than a testimony of the audience’s hunger for constructive social action. It was the birth cry of the thirties. Our youth had found its voice. It was a call to join the good fight for a greater measure of life in a world free of economic fear, falsehood [i.e. betrayal], and craven servitude to stupidity and greed. ‘Strike!’ was Lefty’s lyric message, not alone for a few extra pennies of wages or for shorter hours of work, strike for greater dignity, strike for a bolder humanity, strike for the full stature of man....People went from the theatre dazed and happy: a new awareness and confidence had entered their lives. (Clurman 148)

Within weeks Lefty was on Broadway with another Odets one-act called Till the

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Day I Die, an antifascist play responding to the rise of fascism in Europe. By summer, the play was being performed in thirty cities, by year’s end in over a hundred. And not long afterward it was playing in places as distant as Moscow and Johannesburg.

When Awake and Sing! and Paradise Lost were added to Odets’ list of produced plays in that same year of 1935, there was little doubt that his achievement would shine brightly in the years ahead (the graveyard problem again). To be sure, critics had their negative assessments (the harshest criticism came from the left-wing press), but for the most part the theatre world was astonished by the arrival of so prodigal and prolific a playwright. Alas, we know that this kind of heady success was to be short- lived, though it certainly wasn’t obvious at the time. And the turn that Odets’ life took, and it wasn’t a left turn, was to foreshadow the personal and artistic conflict that plagued him until his death from cancer in 1963.

The Group actors would stay together, more or less, for another six years under Clurman’s direction (Strasberg and Crawford left in 1937), and in its lifetime produced 22 plays plus a few revivals. For all its notoriety, it never achieved financial stability, and it never could escape the internal disputes that wore down the artistic energies of so spirited a collection of artists. Yet, it seems correct to conclude that in the long run, the attitude the Group struck and the artistic alternatives they propounded (though often didn’t adhere to) were at least as important as the actual contribution they made to American theatre. When combined with the work of the even shorter-lived that was making its own unique contribution to American theatre history at exactly the same time, there is substance to the legacy they left behind: of the dream of a permanent theatre organization, perhaps one that is federally funded, dedicated to the cause of social justice on an ongoing basis, and one that stood for, in Weales words, “a place to stand, a communality of fellow artists (and/or workers), a job that had both artistic and social validity.” (“The Group Theatre...” 70) As Malcolm Goldstein has written, “all [its plays] were committed to the idea of social theater, and it was a rare play that could attract them unless it embodied a cry of protest against poverty, militarism, fascism and bigotry.” (135) Regardless of political preferences, the argument can be made that we’re are still waiting for Lefty...or perhaps we should say “a lefty,” even as we acknowledge that our 21st century world, no stranger to those issues, will need to find its own artistic way to deal with them. Agate’s rallying cry to the drivers is written in the text in capital letters like a telegram, a form of communication unknown to many in the Age of Email.

The Group’s other more important contribution to American theatre and, by association, to America, was a very practical one. With the plays of Odets and other writers, the Group Theatre created a new standard for theatre practice in the work of the people I mentioned earlier. Their understanding and their example of performance is still influential today, and it is almost a cliche to say that the school of , established and disseminated by the Actors’ Studio founded by Lee Strasberg, has determined what American acting and directing (here is seen the importance of Kazan) would be known for around the world.

We need to return to the condition of Odets as the child of Jewish immigrants. It

6 seems likely that, Odets accepted his real family’s struggle to create a sheltering home and viable economic existence with antipathy and dread; he tried suicide three times and, while yet in his mid-20s, he could hardly be said to have established himself at anything that provided financial or personal success. His ethnicity was an indelible influence, and many have pointed out that his Jewishness became in his early plays a signature component of the conflicted and often precarious urban life he dramatized. Thus, the world of the Berger family, so brilliantly illuminated in what I believe to be Odets’ best play Awake and Sing! (dedicated to his father and mother), defines a Jewish family in the moment of its greatest crisis. Broken upon the wheel of financial extremity and existential confusion, it is saved from total failure by a young idealist in their midst named Ralph, who gives up his inheritance to his mother Bessie. It was her dedication to keep them from eviction and together that has made her cruel and almost crazy. Ralph’s last, summarizing proclamation is his graduation into a life of economic justice and ideological clarity: he will fight for heat in the factory and for strength to reinvent the corrupt world of capitalism and its treacheries.

In Awake and Sing!, everyone is seeking both home and freedom, security and, at the same time, escape from the restrictive and suffocating urban nest. It is a theme seen often in American drama. And in Odets’ plays it focuses on the single most important word: betrayal (or sell-out), within a context of economic hardship. “I am homeless wherever I go,” Odets wrote in the diary he kept in the year 1940, “always lonely.”

When Ralph Berger relinquishes his claim to his grandfather’s insurance, he commits himself, many have said too naively, to working for a better life in a better country, one that can supply its citizens with material and ideological sustenance. The enemy is twofold: the pressure to conform to an outworn, exploitative social structure, and the temptation to settle for too little and surrender one’s idealism -- or one’s talent -- for the short-term benefits of profit and pleasure. We are meant to take Ralph’s side in this conflict, a choice made easier when we recall Odets himself was not yet out of his 20s and because the opposition is so craven and vulgar. These are his words:

I’m not blaming you, Mom. Sink or swim–I see it. But it can’t stay like this.... No, I see every house lousy with lies and hate. He said it, Grandpa– Brooklyn hates . Smacked on the nose twice a day. But boys and girls can get ahead like that, Mom. We don’t want life printed on dollar bills....

My days won’t be for nothing. Let Mom have the dough. I’m twenty-two and kickin’! I’ll get along. Did Jake die for us to fight about nickels? No! ‘Awake and sing,’ he said....The night he died I saw it like a thunderbolt! I saw he was dead and I was born! I swear to God, I’m one week old! I want the whole city to hear it– fresh blood, arms. We got ‘em. We’re glad we’re living.” (III)

To which his sister’s crippled suitor Moe replies, as he is about to escape the house of Berger with the married woman he loves, in a meaningful and memorable line based on an economic exchange: “I wouldn’t trade you for two pitchers and an outfielder.” For one perfect moment Odets created a character that is both attached and free, and ready to carry out his grandfather’s advice contained in a single, yiddish-inflected

7 verb: “do.” It wouldn’t be long before Odets’ own trading skills were put to the severest test.

Filled with heady success after his astonishing debut, Odets decided to leave his “family” and head for , and it was a fateful decision that ate at his conscience for the rest of his life. He intended to earn money and send much of it back to his comrades at the Group. Others like had preceded him in breaking with the “family,” and many others would follow. For Odets the move was fraught with significance and worry. Hadn’t Clurman pressured him to write the masterpiece that would bail out the company and insure its life? Wasn’t it time to cash in on his talent and take the film industry by storm? Promised thousands of dollars per week (he began with the Group at $35.00), he took the jump and, though he frequently returned to New York, he became in his own mind the type of person he hated as much as anything: a sell-out of his friends and his principles. In this figure, I believe, can be seen the mixture of forces that are tied together in Odets: psychological turbulence, artistic and cultural yearning, economic need and political ideology, qualities of his character that determined his most controversial deed: the “naming names” of his friends before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952.

1937 began in Hollywood for Odets. He had a new wife, the academy award winner with whom his behavior was erratic, full of ardor and self- destructiveness. Their time together was passionate and unbearable, full of jealousy, rage, separation and apology. Depending on the day, Odets’ fortunes could be said to be open and unlimited, or constrained and in decline. The play he had been working on for several years for the Group called The Silent Partner had been rejected. Odets’ biographer Brenman-Gibson writes:

It is the paradox and power of art that even while Odets was enacting...his own deepest conflicts, he was simultaneously trying to bring them to creative resolution by writing a play about a young violinist seduced away from music-making and into the highly-paid violence of the prizefight ring, where he forever cripples his artist’s hands. On the success of this play hinged the life of his brotherhood [I would say: family], the Group Theatre, and his identity as a playwright. (448)

Almost everyone saw in Joe Bonaparte, the protagonist of Golden Boy, the image of Odets himself, torn by talent at war with his professed values, and many also saw in it an allegory of America, the failure of the American Dream, where success can only happen with the death of innocence and the fact of betrayal in a society based in exploitation and profit. The relationship between Joe and the gangster Eddie Fuseli (partly modeled after Odets’ own father, L.J.), speaks, in Italian not Jewish inflection, to the immigrant experience of getting ahead or being cut up (an expression often used in Golden Boy) by the dog-eat-dog economics of the new country as well as the loss of one’s soul in the trade off for fortune or fame. The psychology on display involves a disastrous conflict between independence and enslavement, an ego torn apart by the need to betray those one loves or be destroyed.

In truth, almost every role (and there are many) in this play is rich and full of life, and the conflicts are dramatized with vitality and passion. Note, for example, Joe’s brother Frank, the union organizer, a character that could have been left over from

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Waiting for Lefty, or the caring craftsman of a trainer, Tokio, who offers advice that Joe can’t take on the big night of the fight: “Joe, you’re loaded with love. Find something to give it to. Your heart ain’t in fighting...your hate is. But a man with hate and nothing else...he’s half a man...and half a man is no man. Find something to love, or someone.” (II, 4) Whether or not you agree with Tokio’s point of view, his meaning is clear and his premonition has a homicidal end. (The 1939 movie made of the play – the screenplay was credited to four writers not including Odets – is an absolute disaster, in part due to the rewriting of the play to achieve a happy ending.)

When Joe returns victorious from his bout at the end of the second act with the crowd cheering him, the fact that his hand is broken has a number of meanings, not the least of which is the knowledge that Joe’s life is now fixed in a new direction, and his last exultant line: “Hallelujah!! It’s the beginning of the world!” that echoes Ralph’s at the end of Awake and Sing! is charged with the sense that it is also the beginning of the end of the world. The play begins on the day before Joe turns 21, and ends in the crash and burn of a dream corrupted and driven by the economics of betrayal.

Golden Boy’s opening in November, 1937 was the success that everyone had hoped for. “...we are living in a time when new art works should shoot bullets,” Odets wrote a few months later. The bullets hit their target, and Golden Boy restored the fortunes of the Group and enabled it to carry on for at least a few years more. It redeemed Odets’ reputation that many had adjudged in decline, and foreshadowed Time’s putting him on its cover the following year. It alleviated temporarily some of the stress in his marriage to Rainer (from whom he would separate in 1939), and revisited acclaim on the actors of the Group, most of whom had washed out in Hollywood and returned to New York to pin their hopes on another Odets success.

The rest of Odets’ life can be abbreviated in a few details. The ‘40s were spent in Hollywood again, writing plays and screenplays (, the movie that starred in her first important role) and directing (None But the Lonely Heart with and Ethyl Barrymore). He married again in 1943 to Bette Grayson and had two children, Nora and Walt Whitman Odets. The 50s began with The Country Girl, continued with the divorce and death of his wife, and the premiere of his last play , about and the ark, that was made over into a musical by Richard Rogers and called . His reputation was dogged by the critical opinion that his writing came from a decade no longer of interest to post-war, prosperous America. Three years before his death, living a single-parent’s life of precarious finances, he wrote with Elvis Presley and, in 1962, began a musical version of Golden Boy for Sammy Davis, jr. About Odets’ last days, Margaret Brenman-Gibson wrote almost a quarter-century ago: “In grievers and accusers alike there was unanimity that America had lost not only a playwright of preeminent stature, but one whose personal force had polarized passions of mysteriously high intensity.” (13)

How then might we assess Odets’s legacy? It’s clear to me that if we were to make a list of the dozen important American playwrights of the 20th century, Odets would have a secure place based on his work from the 1930s. He left us three or four

9 of the great plays that both sum up a particular and perhaps unique time in America’s turbulent cultural and economic history and that assert a vision particularly American: one of romantic idealism contending with economic and personal forces that stain, if not destroy, the dreams of “ordinary” people. Ralph is the inheritor of grandpa Jacob’s insurance money (that he decides to give away) AND of Jacob’s bedroom from where we heard the recorded voice of Enrico Caruso singing “O Paradiso!” and saw the photo of Sacco and Vanzetti hanging on the wall. The secularized and ethnicized paradise he hoped would follow from his work, together with the work of his theatrical family in the “Group,” now may seem impossible or naive in the less than perfect world we have inherited from his less than perfect world. He held out the hope of immigrants’ children that through hard work and commitment to community, life would be made better, and the belief was greatly assisted by his confidence in the power of art, not just the theatre and film, but in music and painting as well to accomplish that. In fact, Odets’ knowledge of music and art was thorough, abiding and deeply personal. (An exhibition of his paintings made late in his life took place in in 2006 and revealed another creative side to his creative talents.)

It is true that he was a man of towering contradictions and volcanic passions, and, as Robert Brustein has pointed out, “he was himself so implicated in compromise and corruption.” (10). That his plays argue for the need for nurturing community and at the same time seem to declare it impossible because of our need for individual expression is a tension in his life and his art. Expressed as “the need to find a place” or “the desire for inclusion,” it is identical to the propulsive theme of many of Eugene O’Neill’s plays of the decade of the 1920s. Attend to the last line of Golden Boy for verification. Another thematic connection based in his own “chronic terror of abandonment and betrayal” (Brenman-Gibson, 253) is to be made between Odets and his great contemporary , what Miller calls in his autobiography Timebends “the breaking of charity.” That Miller and Odets chose different paths when interrogated by a congressional committee in the has led to many decades of speculation about the personal costs to artists when they confront political power for it becomes a test of both the individual and, in America’s case, democracy itself.

In addition, we must take special note of Odets’ language, a urban argot that is what many remember about his plays for it is so rich and idiosyncratically attached to several dozen characters with exciting stage life. Only a few years after the playwright’s death, Weales wrote:

Odets had presumably replaced ordinary stage English and literary dialog with the vernacular of the Bronx. In fact, what he had done was to approximate a particular urban rhythm and utilize a tough, oblique way of speaking, a hard-boiled mask for sentiment, which was already used in American farce. ...the result was a literary language which sounded like the real thing... (“The Group Theatre...” 85)

In part because of the way they speak, Agate, Ralph, Bessie, Moe, Lorna and Kewpie (in Paradise Lost) are characters that actors love to act, and they fill a world that, though distant in time, is yet close in experience and passion and love. In a profile of Odets written for in 2006, concluded: “Odets plays showed a way for the next generation of playwrights to combine linear movement with psychological complexity and depth. He brought a new demotic music to stage speech. His struggle

10 was always the heartbroken American soul under capitalism.”

In those three or four great plays, we are able to hear the “music” and feel the “heartbroken soul” and retrieve from the graveyard the strong and sturdy bones of America’s great playwright of the 1930s. “We cancel our experience. This is an American habit,” says Leo Gordon in Paradise Lost. In remembering and reviving Odets, we can refute this sad though honest truth.

WORKS CITED Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets, American Playwright: The Years from 1906-1940 (New York, 1981).

Robert Brustein, “Golden Boy,” The New York Review of Books, 4 February 1982.

Harold Clurman, The Fervent Years (New York, 1945, 1983).

Malcolm Goldstein, “Clifford Odets and the Found Generation,” in American Drama and its Critics, ed. Alan S. Downer (Chicago, 1965).

John Lahr, “Stage Left: The Struggles of Clifford Odets,” The New Yorker (17 April, 2006).

Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (New York, 1987).

Clifford Odets, Six Plays of Clifford Odets (New York, 1939).

Gerald Rabkin, Drama and Commitment (Bloomington, Indiana, 1964).

Robert Skloot, Clifford Odets’s Dog of Betrayal: Awake and Sing!I in Performance, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Spring, 1990.

Robert Warshow, “Clifford Odets: Poet of the Jewish Middle Class,” (1946) in The Immediate Experience (New York, 1962).

Gerald Weales, Clifford Odets, Playwright (New York, 1971).

“The Group Theatre and its Plays,” in J.M. Brown and Bernard Harris, ed., American Theatre, London, 1967.