Author Biography

Playwright Clifford Odets was born on July 18, 1906, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Louis and Pearl Odets, who were Jewish immigrants of Russian and Austrian descent. While Odets was a young boy, his family moved repeatedly between Philadelphia and New York before settling in the Bronx when he was six years old. By the time Odets entered high school, his father had become a successful printer who owned his own print company in New York. Odets senior wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. However, as a youth, Odets performed poorly in school but was a voracious reader and an ardent moviegoer. Despite his poor academic record, as a student at the Morris High School, Odets was an active member of the drama club. In 1923, at the age of seventeen, Odets dropped out of high school to pursue a career in acting. Odets's desire to pursue a career on the stage conflicted with his father's ideas of success and would be a source of conflict from which Odets would draw heavily during his later career as a playwright.

Although he managed to secure a number of minor parts, Odets was unable to find much success as an actor. In 1931, however, Odets's luck changed when he was cast in a minor role in the first production of Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg's newly formed Group Theatre, The House of Connelly' by Paul Green. Odets's relationship with the Group Theatre would eventually result in the 1935 production of his own Waiting for Lefty, the play that established Odets as a playwright of note. Odets was to be associated with the Group Theatre until its demise in 1941.

However, despite the critical and commercial success of Waiting for Lefty, Odets would never really achieve the success his early plays suggested he would. Although Odets wrote over twenty plays between 1935 and 1954, his career apparently failed to achieve the promise hinted at in his early plays.

In 1936, Odets accepted a job writing scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and moved to Hollywood. There, he met and married the actress Luise Rainer on January 8, 1937. Odets's stay in Hollywood lasted only two years. He eventually returned to New York where he wrote Rocket to the Moon in 1938. The marriage suffered from the distance, and the couple divorced in May 1940.

Rocket to the Moon (1938) marked a shift in Odets's focus from the overtly political drama of his early career to a more introspective and personal focus on interpersonal relationships, and his own roots as a second-generation Jewish immigrant. Despite its moderate success, Rocket to the Moon signaled the beginning of the end of the Group Theatre. In 1941, Odets returned to Hollywood and, while he wrote a large number of screenplays, his output for the stage declined markedly. He produced only three more plays before his death of cancer in 1963, at the age of 57. The last of these plays, The Flowering Peach, which was produced in 1954, was slated to receive the Pulitzer Prize. That award, however, was given to Tennessee Williams Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.