Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee dies aged 88

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

Albee also won Pulitzer Prizes for 1967’s A Delicate Balance, 1975’s Seascape and 1991’s Three Tall Women. His plays, believed to be mostly based on his own experiences, were famous for sharp-tongued humour that explored the darker sides of marriage, religion, raising children, and American life.

Albee (pronounced AWL-bee) was born March 12, 1928, in Washington, DC, to Louise Harvey, who, having been deserted by the baby’s father, gave her son up for adoption two weeks later, according to Albee biographer Mel Gussow. But Albee, at a young age, shifted to Manhattan’s Greenwich Village to pursue his dream. The Zoo Story, a one-act piece about two men who meet on a park bench in Central Park, was his debut, and premiered in West Berlin (alongside a Samuel Beckett play) in 1959.

With Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and 1964s Tiny Alice, Albee shook up a Broadway that had been dominated by Tennessee Williams, Miller and their intellectual disciples.

In 2002, well into his 70s, Albee was still going for the unexpected: “His play The Goat, or, Who Is Sylvia” concerned an acclaimed, happily-married architect who throws his life into turmoil by falling into a torrid sexual affair with a goat named Sylvia.

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” presents an all-night drinking bout in which a middle-age professor and his wife verbally spar and unravel their illusions during a visit by a younger couple. Clinton also awarded Albee a National Medal of the Arts that year. Seascape, starring Frances Sternhagen and George Grizzard, was revived in 2005, and A Delicate Balance, with Glenn Close and John Lithgow, was revived in 2014.

“Maybe I’m being a little troublesome about this”, Albee told NPR at the time, “but so many writers who are gay are expected to behave like gay writers and I find that is such a limitation and such a prejudicial thing that I fight against it whenever I can”.

After years of toiling as a writer in obscurity, Albee was thrust as an “overnight success” with the success of “Virginia Wolff” in 1962.

Albee continued to write well into his later years.

Albees longtime companion, sculptor Jonathan Thomas, died in 2005.