Previous Issues
Volume :8 Issue : 32 1988
Add To Cart
Download
The Thirties Revisited Clifford Odets and the Depression
Auther : Mahmoud Al-Shetawi
This paper discusses the proletarian plays of Clifford Odets which he wrote in 1935: Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!, and Paradise Lost. In these plays Odets protests the exigencies inflicted on American people by the Great Depression. He depicts the plight of the working class and the middle class during the 1930s in American society and criticises the tenets of American capitalism. The image of the playwright that emerges in his social drama is that of a proletarian reformer who tries to make his audience aware of the evils of the Depression so as to highlight the need to take action to replace capitalism with a more egalitarian system. Odets social and political views were influenced by the Group Theater which was dedicated to the dissemination of proletarian of proletarian ideas.