SOURCE: "The Making of Americans: Clifford Odets's Implicit Theme," in Proceedings of the IVth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, edited by François Jost, Mouton & Co., 1966, pp. 654-60.

In the excerpt below from a conference paper presented in 1964, Goldstone asserts that Awake and Sing! is Odets' most profound play and explores the significance of money to the characters.

Awake and Sing is a turning away from naturalism, the mode which Zola, Gorki, Elmer Rice and Eugene O'Neill had exploited in their dramatic writings about the poor. Odets chose realism over naturalism, sensing that the time had come when an American dramatist could write realistically about the emerging lower middle class—in this instance, immigrant Eastern European Jews. Realistic drama had previously focused upon the middle and upper middle classes, social groups with whom the theater-going public could identify; only [Sean] O'Casey had successfully used the lower...