Clifford Odets – 1906-1963

Born in Philadelphia, Odets was a stage actor during most of the 1920s and began writing plays in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. Leftist, even socialist in orientation, Odets’s plays made for high drama while appealing to the social consciousness of the audience. Their great strength was that their political orientation never overshadowed their humanity, as in his masterpiece, Awake and Sing (1935), which endures as a moving portrait of a family.