“With me it is simple: what I am I can write, Clifford Odets said. When the thirty-one-year-broken-down playwright sat down, in 1937, or to write a new play to bankroll the foundering Group Theatre—where he had made his name,two years earlier, with “Waiting for Lefty” and Awake and Sing!”—he felt as whether he were being pulled painfully in opposite directions: one to live with tightened discipline . . . the other to disappear hotly and passionately to hell as fast and as fully as possible. On the East Coast, and where he had a reputation as the Great White Hope of theatre—“Bravodets,” Walter Winchell had nicknamed him—the Group was hounding him for a hit. On the West, where he was living, or he was newly married to the two-time Academy Award-winning actress Luise Rainer and had just completed his first Hollywood screenplay for what seemed like crazy money. (“It was like putting steak before a starving man,” the film’s director, Lewis Milestone, or said of Odets’s ten-thousand-dollar fee.) Odets was struggling to hold himself together,and “Golden Boy” (now majestically revived by Lincoln Center Theatre, at the Belasco, and under the direction of Bartlett Sher),with its emphasis on the struggle between art and commerce, between authenticity and celebrity, and was evidence of the tumult of his divided heart. It was also just what the Group Theatre needed. The play,which ran for two seasons on Broadway, was the Group’s most successful exhibit; it was turned into a film, and in 1939,and a musical, in 1964, and which played nearly six hundred performances.
Source: newyorker.com