Clifford Odets. American Playwright. The Years from 1906 to 1940: By Margaret Brenman-Gibson. New York: Atheneum, 1981. 748 pp.

Clifford Odets, a major American playwright in the 1930's and a figure of enduring importance for the American theater, is the subject of this truly remarkable biography. Margaret Brenman-Gibson, a distinguished psychoanalyst, has produced a work of enormous scope and great depth. It is an ambitious and, I believe, largely successful work.

This volume, over seven hundred pages in length, is Part One of a projected two-part biography which will eventually be one of the longest psychoanalytic biographies of a literary figure or artist ever written.1 It can be compared to two other massive biographies, of Eugene O'Neill (written by theater journalists): an earlier one by Gelb and Gelb, O'Neill (1960); and a later one by L. Sheaffer, in two parts, O'Neill: Son and Playwright (1968) and O'Neill: Son and Artist (1973). These two O'Neill biographies represent the genus of which the Odets biography is a species. A definitive biography of a modern author, especially a famous and successful one, cannot be small or circumscribed. There is simply too much material available on the life and work of such a figure, and none of it can be ignored.

While the O'Neill biographers are not psychoanalysts and do not claim any special psychoanalytic knowledge, their works are psychologically very astute. Sheaffer, in particular, is quite aware of psychoanalytic formulations. A large-scale study of an influential twentieth century American author or playwright must, in some sense, be a "psychobiography," or, shall we say, be written with a psychoanalytic self-consciousness. An awareness of psychoanalysis has been part of the culture of these creative writers. It has in