ALBEE, Edward Franklin, III

(b. 12 March 1928 in Virginia), Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright whose controversial work during the 1960s was both celebrated for its intensity and originality and reviled for its honest, graphic nature.

Albee, born somewhere in Virginia, was adopted by Reed Albee, the owner of the Keith-Albee chain of vaudeville theaters, and Frances Cotter. He grew up in Westchester County, New York, a pampered only child whose every wish was indulged. There was little communication with his parents; his domineering mother, when angry, reminded him he was adopted. A loner, Albee grew up with a beloved governess and other parental surrogates, including his maternal grandmother.

Albee's first theatrical experiments were with a young playmate who tied him up with imaginary ropes during one of their improvisations; his terrified screams brought both children's nannies running. Albee and his nanny were often driven by the family chauffeur into New York City to catch Broadway matinees. Albee wrote his first play, a three-act sex farce called Aliqueen, at age twelve. His parents' winter trips to the South interrupted Albee's primary schooling, and he became a troublesome student who was expelled from two private boarding schools before graduating in 1948 from the Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut.

Choate was Albee's first intellectual home, and he became a prolific poet there. At age seventeen he wrote his first novel, The Flesh of Unbelievers, and his first professional publication, a poem, appeared in the Texas monthly Kaleidograph. After three halfhearted semesters at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, Albee ended his formal education, becoming one of many contemporary playwrights who lacked a college education but were known for their brilliant dialogue.

Albee's paternal grandmother left him a small trust fund when she died in 1949, and Albee used this money to leave his parents' home and move to New York City's Greenwich Village. He then traveled to Italy, where he wrote a novel. He met the poet W. H. Auden in New York and the novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder, who encouraged him to write plays, in New Hampshire. Albee started furiously writing plays, many of which were never published or produced. His personal history figured strongly in most of the story lines. Albee, an admitted homosexual from the age of thirteen, was once engaged, but never married or had children. He lived with the composer William Flanagan from 1952 to 1959, and Jonathan Thomas, a Canadian sculptor, from 1971. He also had significant relationships with the playwright Terrence McNally and the decorator William Pennington.

As Albee's thirtieth birthday approached, he felt intensely dissatisfied. In February 1958 he quit his messenger job with Western Union—taking plenty of paper and a typewriter with him—and wrote The Zoo Story in just three weeks. The Zoo Story is a searingly confessional and darkly humorous exchange between a disturbed outcast and a conventional, middle-class family man. With this work, Albee transcended the artificiality that marked his previous plays and achieved a new level of intense realism. Unable to find a U.S. producer for The Zoo Story, Albee premiered the work in Berlin in 1959. It debuted off Broadway in New York City in 1960, when theater in the United States was beginning to examine a seamier and more graphic slice of American culture and values. Albee's The Sandbox, The Death of Bessie Smith, Fam and Yam, and The American Dream were all produced in 1960 and 1961. Some critics identified Albee with the "theater of the absurd" (avantgarde theater made up of pointless scenes meant to express isolation and frustration), although he considered the characterization absurd.

Albee's first full-length play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), is about two couples—one older and mutually abusive, one younger—who come together in a harrowing, drunken, late-night journey into truth and illusion. It debuted on Broadway and earned the Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics Circle Prize as best play of the year. Audiences both laughed and gasped at the play's passion and maliciousness. In one of many controversies surrounding Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which some considered a "filthy" play, Albee was denied a Pulitzer Prize for drama by a censorious Pulitzer board. The film version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) was as groundbreaking as the stage play and won several Academy Awards. It proved to be a cornerstone in the careers of the first-time director Mike Nichols and the actors Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, George Segal, and Sandy Dennis. Although Albee was not involved with the production, he was relieved to find that the screenplay was true to his play.

By 1963 Albee was the most acclaimed young playwright in the United States. He was featured on the cover of Newsweek as the "Odd Man In." By the mid-1960s he was second only to William Shakespeare on the list of the most frequently performed playwrights in college theaters. Albee continued to experiment. His adaptation for Broadway of Carson McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1963) was his first such effort and received only lukewarm reviews. Tiny Alice (1964), Albee's highly anticipated second full-length, original play, was produced on Broadway and became his problem play. It was questioned endlessly, and even Albee could not satisfactorily explain the play's meaning and intention.

Malcolm, another adaptation, and A Delicate Balance were both on Broadway in 1966. Malcolm was a disaster, but A Delicate Balance was one of Albee's best plays and earned him his first Pulitzer Prize. He reworked Giles Cooper's Everything in the Garden (1967) into a suburban tale of a woman who is offered a job as a prostitute when she and her husband are down on their luck. Next in line were two interrelated plays, Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (1968), which were his most abstract works.

Albee's influence on American theater during the 1960s resulted in a shift from the gay and optimistic productions of the 1950s. He was a pioneer of a new and sometimes disturbing vérité that took hold of American playwrights of the era, and remains evident in contemporary theater. Although he never repeated the success of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Albee never stopped writing plays as he pleased and endured critical buffeting. He won two more Pulitzer Prizes, for Seascape (1975), and Three Tall Women (1994). Of all of his autobiographical story lines, none was as personal as Three Tall Women, written after his mother's death in 1989 about their troubled relationship. Albee lectured, taught playwriting, and served as the head of the U.S. chapter of the International Theater Institute. In 1993 a good number of his plays, including several premieres, were staged in New York City, including a year-long festival of his work. Forty years after his first great success, Albee was once again the toast of Broadway, as his The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? won the Tony Award for best play of 2002.

Biographies of Albee include Ruby Cohn, Edward Albee (1969), and Mel Gussow, Edward Albee: A Singular Journey (1999). Reviews include Brooks Atkinson, "Theatre: A Double Bill Off Broadway," New York Times (15 Jan. 1960); Thomas Lask, "Dramatist in a Troubled World," New York Times (22 Jan. 1961); Howard Taubman, "Theatre: Intense Hour," New YorkTimes (2 Mar. 1961); "The Theater: Albee's 'Who's Afraid,'" New York Times (15 Oct. 1962); Peter Kihss, "Albee Wins Pulitzer Prize; Malamud Novel Is Chosen," New York Times (2 May 1967); Mel Gussgow, "Edward Albee, Elder Statesman, Is in a State of Professional Reprise," New York Times (1 Dec. 1993); and Steven Drukman, "Edward Albee: Who's Afraid of Controversy? Not This Playwright," Interview (Mar. 2002).

Brenna Sanchez