Clifford Odets was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1906. He left school at age seventeen and worked as an announcer on local New York and Philadelphia radio stations, and as an actor in theater groups and traveling stock companies based in Philadelphia and New York until 1931, when the Group Theatre was formed. As one of the founding members, Odets continued acting in minor roles, but found new release for his creativity in writing plays. It was during this time that he wrote Awake and Sing!, Waiting for Lefty, and Paradise Lost. These three plays marked him as one of the most important playwrights of the period, but not without some controversy. The proletarian themes of these early plays and his suspected affiliations with the Communist Party resulted in his testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1952.

During the production of Paradise Lost in 1935-1936, Odets made his first trip to Hollywood, where he signed with Paramount Pictures to write his first screenplay, The General Died at Dawn. In 1937 he married movie star Luise Rainer and continued to shuttle between Hollywood and New York until the Group Theatre's demise in 1940. Odets and Rainer were divorced that year, and in 1943 he married actress Bette Grayson. The two settled in Hollywood where Odets produced, directed and/or wrote screenplays for such films as None But the Lonely Heart, and, later, Sweet Smell of Success. Odets and Grayson moved their young family back to New York in 1948, where he wrote and produced two more plays on Broadway, The Country Girl and The Flowering Peach. Grayson died unexpectedly in 1954, leaving Odets to raise their two children, Nora and Walt Whitman. He and the children moved back to Los Angeles in 1955. In 1961 Odets signed with the television drama series The Richard Boone Show as editor-in-chief. He died in August 1963 before he was able to see two of his own scripts, Big Mitch and The Mafia Man, produced for the series.