Albee died at his home in Montauk, New York, after a short illness, according to his personal assistant, Jakob Holder, the Times said.
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Edward Albee, considered as one of the great playwrights of his time, has died at the age of 88, at his home in Montauk, east of NY, his personal assistant Jackob Holder said on Friday (16 September).
Born Edward Harvey on March 12, 1928, in what some say was Virginia and others the U.S. capital Washington, Albee was given up for adoption shortly afterward.
Albee was proclaimed the playwright of his generation after his blistering “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” opened on Broadway in 1962.
In recent years, he told TV’s Charlie Rose he was “thrown out” by his adoptive parents because they didn’t approve of his wanting to become a writer.
In 1996 he described the effect of the play’s success: “I find Virginia Woolf hung about my neck like a shining medal of some sort – really nice but a trifle onerous”.
“I think if a writer gets ideas, you’ve got to get them out of your head”, he said.
The work did win a Tony Award for best play, and was later adapted for a film starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. His works would eventually rank him alongside Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill in American drama.
Albee always considered himself a writer first and foremost.
Although the stage version was selected by a Pulitzer Prize jury for the 1963 drama award, the Pulitzer advisory board overruled the jurors because of the play’s controversial nature. Running 582 performances, Albee took home Obie and Drama Desk Awards.
Albee spent much of the 1950s writing poetry and fiction, before turning his hand to plays.
Other notable works include The Zoo Story, A Delicate Balance, The Sandbox, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia, The Lady from Dubuqe and The American Dream.
“I don’t like the idea of getting older and older because there’s meant to be a time when that has to stop”, Albee said in 2001.
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He spent 30 years with his partner Jonathan Thomas, from 1971 till Thomas’s death in 2005. “If it’s merely decorative, it’s a waste of time”.
