Clifford Odets

Clifford Odets was born in Philadelphia on 18 July 1906 and raised in the Bronx, the son of a businessman father who pushed him toward commercial success he initially resisted. He left high school to pursue acting, working in small stage companies through the 1920s, and in 1931 became a founding member of the Group Theatre, the influential New York ensemble devoted to socially engaged, Stanislavski-trained American drama. His breakthrough came in 1935 with Waiting for Lefty, a one-act agitprop drama about a taxi strike that made him famous almost overnight, followed the same year by Awake and Sing!, a Depression-era family drama regarded as his finest play. For a brief period he was considered by many critics the most important American playwright of his generation, a potential successor to Eugene O'Neill. Odets moved between Broadway and Hollywood screenwriting through the late 1930s and 1940s, a shift some contemporaries saw as a betrayal of his theatrical seriousness — a tension he wrote about directly in his 1937 play Golden Boy. He wrote and, in 1944, directed None but the Lonely Heart, adapting his own screenplay from Richard Llewellyn's novel. In 1952 he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, naming names of former Group Theatre colleagues with Communist Party ties, a decision that damaged his standing in the theater community for the rest of his career. He continued writing for film and television, including an uncredited hand in Sweet Smell of Success (1957), until his death from stomach cancer in Los Angeles on 14 August 1963, at fifty-seven.