[Even] in Golden Boy, which is far and away better theatre fare than any other Odets play, he is still the most personal of all playwrights, still speaking for himself and listening to himself as he speaks. He is still recording rather than creating, still not quite dramatically mature, with all of his faults as plain to see in his playwriting as white figures on a blackboard. But he has vigor, a mental and spiritual pressure of ideas against his material which does not let his story down, and he is acquiring a sure sense of form. He has, moreover, that gift of rhythmic speech which is the mark of the more-than-one-play author, a gift which most little boys on any street corner possess, and which grown men seem somehow unhappily to lose before they put their pens to the pages of a play.

This gift of speech Odets has not yet quite under control. To give it full value he must either set it free or discipline it more severely, or both. Many of the most authentic and spirited passages of his dialogue still sound like phrases carefully culled from a notebook carefully documented by a playwright with a fine ear. It is some of the lush, sentimental scenes in Golden Boy, overwritten but with a clear, crisp undertone, that show how well Odets will write when he once creates freely and allows his characters to speak out of their own mouths. (p. 12)

Golden Boy tells Joe Bonaparte's story concretely and well—the swift, almost unthinking plunge into the fighter's world, the first defensive fights that subconsciously protected the musician's hands from danger, the growing lust for success, the love for the girl who belonged to his boss, the separation from his family—especially from the loving, soulful father—the final victory and the death of his opponent, the disillusionment.

Only at the end of the story does the author of Golden Boy fail, both in ambition and attainment. Death is too easy and too false an ending. Golden boys, at the moment of empty victory, do not ride out into the dark with a beautiful maiden and crash against the heavens they thought to storm. (p. 13)