Edward Albee (b. 1928)

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LINKS

The New York Times: Edward Albee
http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/08/15/specials/albee.html

This site, maintained by the New York Times, provides a wide array of information on the playwright. The archive includes more than twenty reviews of his plays, articles by and about Albee, and links to related sites.

New York State Writer's Institute: Edward Albee
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/albee_edward.html

This site features a good biography of the three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, a list of his plays and awards, and good links to related sites.

Kennedy Center Honors: Edward Albee
http://www.kennedy-center.org/programs/specialevents/honors/history/honoree/albee.html

Here you can read the Kennedy Center’s profile of Albee, who in 1996 received a Kennedy Center Honors Award for his contribution to American culture.

BIOGRAPHY

Edward Albee (b. 1928) was born in Washington, D.C. When he was two weeks old, he was adopted by Reed and Frances Albee, a wealthy couple in Larchmont, New York, and named after his adopted grandfather, Edward Franklin Albee, part owner of the Keith-Albee Theater circuit, a coast-to-coast chain of vaudeville theaters. By the time he applied for preparatory school at Choate, he knew he wanted to become a playwright. At Choate, he published a one-act melodrama in the literary magazine. When Albee turned twenty-one, he received from his grandmother a $100,000 trust fund, which enabled him to drop out of Trinity College in Hartford and move to New York City to write plays. Albee supplemented the income from his inheritance by working a series of odd jobs, including that of a Western Union messenger.

For nearly a decade he shared an apartment in Chelsea with William Flanagan, who recalled that Albee "adored the theatre from the beginning and there can't have been anything of even mild importance that we didn't see together." As an aspiring playwright, Albee admired the plays of Tennessee Williams, but when he discovered his own voice in the theater, he said he recognized he was one of the "children of [Samuel] Beckett."

Shortly before Albee's thirtieth birthday, when it looked as if he might have no talent for playwriting, he sat down at the kitchen table and wrote The Zoo Story. Flanagan sent it to friends in Europe, and it was given a workshop production in German translation in Berlin in 1959, on a double bill with Beckett's one-act play Krapp's Last Tape. The following year both plays were produced in English in the off-Broadway Provincetown Playhouse. In 1960 Albee wrote a trilogy of one-act plays—The Sandbox, The Death of Bessie Smith, and Fam and Yam—which he followed in 1961 with The American Dream and Bartleby, an operatic adaptation of Herman Melville's story. The Sandbox and The American Dream were often produced on college campuses, and they made Albee's reputation until he scored his first success on Broadway with the full-length play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? This won the Drama Critics Circle Award in 1962 and launched Albee's career as a major American playwright even before it was made into a successful film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

Albee has received three Pulitzer Prizes since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, one in 1967 for A Delicate Balance, one in 1975 for Seascape, and, in 1994, a third for his autobiographical drama Three Tall Women. Albee’s awards place him among other accomplished dramatists such as Tennessee Williams, holder of two Pulitzers, Robert E. Sherwood, a three-time winner, and four-time honoree Eugene O’Neill. Most recently, Albee won the 2002 Tony Award for best play for The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?

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