SOURCE: "Odd Man In," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXV, No. 14, September 29, 1988, pp. 37-42.

In the following excerpt, Denby reviews The Time is Ripe: The 1940 Journal of Clifford Odets, and comments on Odets's personal revelations at the beginning of a career slide.

Clifford Odets, [Elia] Kazan's friend and colleague in the Group, had such a mission [an artist's] and was ruined. In love with the theater but eager to make money, Odets dragged himself unhappily through long years in Hollywood, often working on screenplays never filmed or on anonymous rewrites of other men's work (at the end of his life. be was writing a television series for the actor Richard Boone). The journal he kept in 1940, now published by Grove Press as The Time is Ripe, suggests how much the movies attracted and shamed him. In the course of the year (he is thirty-three at...