No immediate cause of death was given, but his death followed a short illness, his assistant Jackob Holder said. Although it won the Tony and most other major prizes, Virginia Woolf was found by the Pulitzer board to violate their charter, which required the winning play to reflect “American values”. He left home as a young man and moved to Greenwich Village, holding various jobs to support himself while he worked at his writing.
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Albee claimed his first Pulitzer in 1967 for A Delicate Balance, which was also adapted for the big screen with Katharine Hepburn as Agnes.
“I went to see Virginia Woolf and I was stunned, paralyzed”, Nichols later told director Jack O’Brien in an interview filmed for HBO. “A Delicate Balance” was revived a year later, starring Glenn Close. He was “widely considered the foremost American playwright of his generation, whose psychologically astute and piercing dramas explored the contentiousness of intimacy, the gap between self-delusion and truth and the roiling desperation beneath the facade of contemporary life”, the Times reports.
Estranged from his parents, Albee moved to NY and worked as a messenger for Western Union before gaining notice with The Zoo Story, a one-act play, written in 1958, about two strangers meeting on a bench in the city’s Central Park.
“He was unanimously hailed as the successor to Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O’Neill”.
In a career that saw him write 30 plays, he adopted several novels for the stage, including Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. He was awarded the Gold Medal in Drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1980 and in 1996 received the Kennedy Center Honors and the National Medal of Arts. In “The Goat or Who is Sylvia?” the main character falls in love with a goat. His long-time partner Jonathan Thomas died from cancer in 2005.
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Edward Albee poses for a portrait in NY in 2008. “The mourning never ends; it just changes”.
