IN Cliford Odets: Playwright (New York, I97), Gerald Weales has noted that Waiting for Lefty (1935) was not based on direct knowledge of the I934 New York taxi strike and has identified Joseph North's "Taxi Strike" (New Masses, April 3, I934) as one of Odets's chief sources: "North uses, almost as an epigraph, a long paragraph identified as 'Hackie's Fable,' in which the wife demands-as Edna does in the first scene of Lefty-that the driver choose between her and the company. Agate's identification of the Communist salute with the 'good old uppercut to the chin' at the end of Odets's play comes directly from North ('His left fist-a huge affair-goes up in a sort of short uppercut'), although North goes Odets one better at the tough metaphor game by letting his Pondsie call it 'The left hook'" (pp. 42-43). Closer examination of the material confirms Weales's observation that Odets's was a "flypaper talent" and suggests even more analogues. Driver Joe Mitchell's description of himself and the others as "the black and blue boys," for instance, may have had its origin in the "Blue and Black" Harlem taxis mentioned in North. Though Weales dutifully records the importance of cartoon art in the agit-prop plays of the period and points to the character of union boss Harry Fatt as an example of "the standard cartoon stereotype" (P. 44), his account does not, I suspect, fully explore the influence of such material in Lefty. There are portions of the play, such as Sid's outburst against the "big shot money men" in Episode III, that are little more than cartoon drawings turned into speech: "They got the power and mean to be damn sure they keep it. They know if they give in just an inch, all the dogs like us will be down on them together-an ocean knocking them to hell and back and each singing cuckoo with stars coming from their nose and ears." In fact, cartoon art may well have supplied Odets with the title to his play. By most accounts Lefty was written shortly before the Group Theater's Boston run of Melvin Levy's Gold Eagle Guy. Since the Levy play did not open until November I2, Odets would have had ample time to be familiar with the new cartoon character the Daily