SOURCE: A review of Golden Boy, in The New Republic, Vol. LXXXXIII, No. 1198, 17 November 1937, pp. 44-5.

In this assessment of Golden Boy, Young praises Odets' handling of dialogue, adding: "In this respect Mr. Odets is the most promising writer our theatre can show. "

It seems to me the first thing about Mr. Odets' new play that we should mention is a certain quality in the dialogue. He has a sense of character drawing that exhibits the courage of outline. An unusual number of the characters in Golden Boy are set beside one another with the right bold theatre instinct, a perception of the fact, unknown to most playwrights nowadays, that character in fiction and character on the stage are two very different matters—see the fuzzy nonsense in most British plays that come to Broadway. He has an intuition of emotional impacts that make real theatre instead of...