The play's strike and union meeting scenes were inspired by a forty-day[1] strike of New York City cab drivers in 1934.[2][3] Odets published the play in New Theatre magazine with the subtitle "A Play in Six Scenes, Based on the New York City Taxi Strike of February 1934."[4] The historic strike was led by Samuel Orner,[5] after he was fired for failing to make enough money for the cab company on a particular night shift.[6][1] According to Orner, Odets based the meeting scene on a real meeting in the Bronx where Orner had addressed his fellow cab drivers: "He must have taken notes because so many lines in Waiting For Lefty were the same as in the meeting, almost word for word."[1]
In the play, the cabdrivers find Lefty dead at the end. In the 1934 strike, Orner was found drugged and unconscious on the night of the union meeting,[6] but he was roused and taken there before the vote was called. He rallied the drivers to reject the owners' contract offer.[1]
During the political attacks on communism and artists of the left in the 1950s in the United States, Odets distanced himself from having used the 1934 strike. In his 1950s testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee, Odets denied that he had based his play on that strike or been to a union meeting of cab drivers.[6] Odets said, "It is just something I kind of made up...I didn't know anything about a taxicab strike...I have never been near a strike in my life."[4]
According to literary historian Christopher Herr, rather than trying to create a historical account, Odets used the strike as a symbol to attack what he saw as the larger issue: that in the middle of the Great Depression, the capitalist structures of the time had remained unaltered.[7]
