[3] According to Luther Adler in the presentation's intro, Paradise Lost was Clifford Odets' favorite and Harold Clurman considered it one of the six or seven really important contemporary American plays.

Brooks Atkinson reviewed the play in The New York Times on December 10, 1935: "Paradise Lost" is more an exercise in style than an organic drama.

If the design of the play is apparently formless and aimless, that is Mr. Odets's conscious way of reflecting the stalemate lives of the society he is describing.

[4]The reviewer for The New York Times wrote of the 1971 television film that the play was an inordinately difficult work, especially on the home screen.

The inarticulation of people to develop thoughts and philosophies may not make for the most exciting conventional theater but it can be a cameo of persons as they really are, a portrait of society at loose ends.