Clifford Odets is known primarily as a proletarian playwright of the 1930s, although this label is misleading. Odets's first few plays, which catapulted him virtually overnight to fame and affluence, reflect the experience of the Great Depression and have an explicit socialist message. Beginning with Golden Boy (1937), however, Odets broadened the scope of his plays, thus drawing severe criticism for allegedly abandoning his ideological direction. Actually, this charge has little validity; an examination of Odets's plays reveals that his basic theme, the struggle of the individual to maintain his integrity, remains constant, and that it is Odets's tone which undergoes change--from militancy to moderation.

Odets's own family was decidedly middle-class. He was born in Philadelphia; during his early childhood, his father Louis, a Jewish Russian immigrant, held various jobs selling newspapers and peddling salt, and his mother worked in a factory. When he was six, the family (Odets...