After Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams held sway over American theater in the middle of the last century, Albee surfaced in the 1960s as “the American agent of the Absurd, our homegrown equivalent of (Samuel) Beckett”, said Gussow, a New York Times critic.
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He burst onto the theater scene with “The Zoo Story” (1958) at age 30.
Albee was proclaimed the playwright of his generation after his blistering Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened on Broadway in 1962. It ran for more than a year and half, and enthralled and shocked theatregoers with its depiction of stifling academia and of a couple whose relationship has been corroded by dashed hopes, wounding recriminations and drink.
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. At the end of the Fifties his plays were produced off-Broadway, and during the Sixties two of his Broadway successes won Pulitzer prizes. It was a fitting beginning for a playwright whose work took scabrous aim at the upper classes, depicting bourgeois life as a turbulent sea of venality and dread beneath a thin veneer of bland gentility, as in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1966 masterpiece, A Delicate Balance. That was made into a 1973 film starring Katharine Hepburn and Paul Scofield.
Edward Albee, victor of the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for drama, for his play “A Delicate Balance”, talks to reporters during a news conference. He also was given a special Tony Award for lifetime achievement.
He was born Edward Harvey on March 12, …
Edward Albee taught audiences to see society from a different perspective through his plays.
An unconventional student, Albee attended several schools, including The Choate School in Wallingford, Conn., from which he graduated in 1946, and Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., from 1946 to 1947.
He moved to New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1950s, finding a more sympathetic environment in the avant-garde scene, where he wrote “The Zoo Story” that marked his breakthrough in theater.
Albee for many years taught courses in playwriting at the University of Houston and helped fund writers through his Montauk, Long Island, arts colony.
The same year he was awarded a National Medal of the Arts by then-president Bill Clinton.
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Sharp-tongued humor and dark themes were the hallmarks of Albee’s style.
