The character of Barton Fink is loosely based on Clifford Odets, a playwright from New York who in the 1930s joined the Group Theatre, a gathering of dramatists which included Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasberg. Their work emphasized social issues and employed Stanislavski's system of acting to recreate human experience as truthfully as possible. Several of Odets' plays were successfully performed on Broadway, including "Awake and Sing!" and "Waiting for Lefty" (both in 1935). When public tastes turned away from politically engaged theatre and toward the familial realism of Eugene O'Neill, Odets had difficulty producing successful work, so he moved to Hollywood and spent 20 years writing film scripts.