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Edward Albee, Pulitzer-Winning Playwright, Dead At 88

Victor of three Pulitzer Prizes, Albee is famous for his work Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

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Personal assistant Jackob Holder says Albee died Friday at his home in Montauk on Long Island after a short illness, but no cause of death was released.

A three-time Pulitzer Prize victor, he was arguably America’s greatest living playwright after the deaths of Arthur Miller and August Wilson in 2005. The scathing portrait of an unhappy marriage contained language rarely heard on the stage.

It was later made into a 1966 black-comedy movie directed by Mike Nichols and starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who won an Oscar as best actress.

American playwright Edward Albee, who was awarded three Pulitzer prizes, has died.

In 2005 Albee was awarded a Tony Lifetime Achievement Award. I am a writer who happens to be gay’.

“I think if a writer gets ideas, you’ve got to get them out of your head”, he said. He observed that no one would describe Arthur Miller as a “straight playwright”.

No other details on his death were immediately available.

“I feel it’s like a piece of music, a musical score”, she said. “Seascape” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” were revived on Broadway in 2005, and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” was revived on Broadway again in 2013.

Born in Virginia in 1928 and adopted at 18 days old, Albee grew up in Westchester County outside NY.

Albee had a troubled relationship with his parents and was expelled from several private preparatory schools, and also was expelled from Trinity College in CT. At 17, he dropped out of college and moved to Greenwich Village.

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Albee always considered himself a writer first and foremost. It was an Obie Award victor and put him on a path to the success of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He made his Broadway debut in 1962, with the landmark, Tony-winning Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He was 88. Albee once told the Paris Review that he decided at age 6 that he was a writer but chose to write plays after concluding he was not a very good poet or novelist. He is predeceased by his longtime partner, sculptor Jonathan Thomas.

Acclaimed playwright Edward Albee dies at 88