Style
Odets' dramatic style is distinguished by a kind of poetic, metaphor-laden street talk. Arthur Miller observed that, with Odets' first plays, ″For the very first time in America, language itself . . . marked a playwright as unique.″ Odets' use of ethnic and urban speech patterns reflects the influence of another socialist playwright with proletarian concerns, Sean O'Casey. Other hallmarks of Odets' style are his humanistic point of view, and his way of dropping the audience right into the conflict with little or no introduction. Often character is more important than plot, reflecting the influence of Anton Chekhov.
Read more about this topic: Clifford Odets
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)