Clifford Odets And American Political Theatre by Christopher J. Herr

A scholarly study of a major 20th-century playwright that situates his plays within the politics and cultural struggles of 1930s–40s America, showing how his Group Theatre roots and leftist commitments produced dramas that mobilized audiences around working-class concerns. Using archival materials and close readings, it traces tensions between aesthetic innovation and political allegiance, the impact of commercial and Hollywood pressures on his later work, and the lasting debates his career provoked about realism, ideology, and the role of theater in democratic life.

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