His was a life famously celebrated and equally misinterpreted-a stunning early success followed by complicated betrayals and a fierce commitment to his family. As impossible as it might be to convey all the complexity of Clifford Odets, we hope to give our readers a sense of the span of his life with reminiscences by his early colleagues and Group Theatre collaborators Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Elia Kazan, and interviews with Ellen Adler, the daughter of the actress and teacher Stella Adler, and Odets' son, Walt Odets. We are especially pleased to share with you the voice of Clifford Odets himself, in one of the last long interviews of his career, conducted by the then doctoral student Arthur Wagner.

Odets was a man with a brilliant ear and the ability to invent language that crackles with an elevated authenticity. The novelist Lore Segal explores the curious means by which writers achieve an authentic voice; the scholar Ellen Schiff shows us how Awake and Sing! emerged from early drafts; and the cultural historian Alfred Kazin captures the utter joy of encountering the play when he was a young man. The actress Marian Seldes explores Odets' influence on the playwrights who followed him; and the critic John Lahr establishes why Odets' particular gift for exposing humankind's need to dream big will never go out of fashion. As for Odets' success and subsequent journey into the film industry, the writer Neal Gabler reflects on how Odets' path mirrored that of other Jews who invented Hollywood.

There are contradictions and searing illuminations in these pages. Ultimately, perhaps Odets' fateful decisions can be measured simply in terms of how he, like so many writers before him and since, wrestled with the need to balance a desire to make meaningful work with the exigencies of supporting his family. He was a man in pursuit of integrity, a writer, a father. In celebration of the centenary of his birth and the seventy-first anniversary of the premiere of Awake and Sing!, here is a look at the combustive, passionate playwright, Clifford Odets.

-Deborah Artman, Editor