Edward Albee

Edward Albee, born in 1928, American playwright, whose most successful plays focus on familial relationships. Edward Franklin Albee was born in Washington, D.C., and adopted as an infant by the American theater executive Reed A. Albee of the Keith-Albee chain of vaudeville and motion picture theaters. Albee attended a number of preparatory schools and, for a short time, Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He wrote his first one-act play, The Zoo Story (1959), in three weeks. Among his other plays are the one-act The American Dream (1961); Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962); The Ballad of the Sad Café (1963), adapted from a novel by the American author Carson McCullers; Tiny Alice (1964); and A Delicate Balance (1966), for which he won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize in drama. For Seascape (1975), which had only a brief Broadway run, Albee won his second Pulitzer Prize. His later works include The Lady from Dubuque (1977), an adaptation (1979) of Lolita by the Russian American novelist Vladimir Nabokov, and The Man Who Had Three Arms (1983). In 1994 he received a third Pulitzer Prize for Three Tall Women (1991). Albee won a Tony Award in 2002 for The Goat, or Who is Sylvia (2002), a play about a happily married architect who falls in love with a goat. Albee’s plays are marked by themes typical of the theater of the absurd, in which characters suffer from an inability or unwillingness to communicate meaningfully or to sympathize or empathize with one another.