1930 s were by Clifford Odets (1906-1963), whose Waiting for Lefty (1935) had a vigor that his later plays could not recapture. The former shows the awakening of class consciousness of workers and intellectuals under the pressure of want and exploitation, the growth of the militant spirit of the people rising to fight their oppressors. The play opens with a prologue showing a trade union meeting discussing the question of whether to declare a strike or not. His Awake and Sing! (1935), a nostalgic family drama, became another popular success, followed by Golden Boy, the story of an Italian immigrant youth who ruins his musical talent when he is seduced by the lure of money to become a boxer and injures his hands.O Neill is generally considered the first important figure in American drama. It is significant that several decades after the 1920 production of his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, he is still regarded as the most important playwright America has produced.drama before O Neill consisted mostly of shows and entertainments. These wildly theatrical spectacles often featured such delights as chariot races and burning cities, staged by means of special effects that dazzled audiences. Melodramas and farces were also written for famous actors, much as television shows today are created to display the personalities and talents of popular performers. In fact, O Neill s own father, James, spent the better part of his life touring in a spectacular melodrama based on Alexander Dumas s The Count of Monte Cristo. Neill s early one-act plays of the sea, such as Bound Fast for Cardiff (1916), In the Zone (1917), The Long Voyage Home (1917), and The Moon of the Caribbees (1919) described hard life of the sailors whose life he knew well being a sailor himself. He became widely known in the twenties when these were followed by full-length psychological plays like Gold (1921), The Emperor Jones (1921) and Anna Christie (1922), which established his American preeminence. Most of his characters are dissatisfied with life and express their protest against the injustice of the society. In his play The Hairy Ape (1922) he creates the image of a stoker on a liner who is scorned by the rich passengers. Strange Interlude (1928) is a nine-act Freudian tragedy of frustrated desire; Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), a trilogy, is an American version of a Greek tragedy of fate. O Neill masterly used the techniques of the antique theatre. In The Great God Brown (1926), for example, he uses masks, in other plays he restores the chorus of the Greek drama. O Neill adopted the language of poetic symbolism. He received the Pulitzer Prize for his tragedy Beyond the Horizon. Neill was always an experimenter. In The Iceman Cometh (1946) he abandons physical action on the stage for a life in words; in Long Day s Journey into Night (produced posthumously in 1956), one of his finest as well as most personal plays, his characters simply talk in a family living room. It sa powerful, extended autobiography in dramatic form focusing on his own family and their physical and psychological deterioration, as witnessed in the course of one night.aware of Sigmund Freud and his new theories about complex self, O Neill tried especially hard to reveal more than realism could normally reveal. In The Great God Brown, O Neill experimented with using masks to differentiate between two sides of a personality. In Days Without End (1934), he had two actors play one character to achieve the same end. And in Strange Interlude characters spoke in aside to the audience, revealing thoughts and feelings that could not be expressed in dialogue. O Neill dominated American drama in his generation; he can be said to have put it on the map . His plays were widely produced abroad, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936.to O Neill s, the most distinguished American plays of the 1930 s and 1940 s were by Thornton Wilder, also a novelist of excellence. His Our Town (1938), which has become a classic, is an idyll of the meaning of existence. The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) is an optimistic version of the theory of cyclical history.the post-World War II period, four dramatists in particular left their mark: William Inge (1913-1973), Tennessee Willia...
