Waiting for Lefty and Other Plays
by Clifford Odets
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Six plays by Cliffor Odets, who is considered the most gifted American social protest dramatist of the thirties.Tags
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Clifford Odets was a well-regarded communist playwright of the first half of the century, whom I believe was blacklisted in the McCarthy era. These plays are colored to an extent by his political leanings, but on the whole they are compassionate and sympathetic portrayals of the common people of the land struggling to find happiness and prosperity in a system geared against them. "Rocket To the Moon" is probably his most mature and successful play here, with an unlikely hero emerging at the conclusion. "Golden Boy" is also quite good. The others are more strongly flavored by Odets' politics, somewhat to their detriment.
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With Lillian Hellman, Odets remains one of the foremost U.S. dramatists of the 1930s. Born in Philadelphia, he became an actor about 1923 and joined the Group Theatre upon its founding in 1930. From then until its collapse in 1940, the Group Theatre produced seven plays by Odets, all of which reflect the Depression era in which they were written. show more His first play, Waiting for Lefty (1935), an agitprop play about strikers, was an enormous success. Most of his other plays of the 1930s, most notably Awake and Sing (1935) and Paradise Lost (1935), concern the economic and psychological plight of poor New York City Jewish families and heighten middle-class Jewish speech into a kind of poetry. After the collapse of the Group Theatre, Odets produced only four more plays. Odets was criticized, however, for betraying his leftist sympathies when he named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Alternate titles
- Six plays by Clifford Odets
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- Both Waiting for Lefty and Other Plays AND Six Plays by Clifford Odets contain the following plays: Waiting for Lefty / Awake and Sing! / Till the Day I Die / Paradise Lost / Golden Boy / Rocket to the Moon
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