Edward Franklin Albee

The playwright Edward Albee (1928-2016) was born in Virginia, USA, and was adopted two weeks after his birth. His adoptive father was Reed A. Albee, son of Edward Franklin Albee II, who owned a chain of theaters in the 1920s. His youth was marked by conflict with his adoptive parents and his expulsion from various high schools, including Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania, as well as from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. According to Salman Rushdie, "Albee said he realized he was gay at the age of 12." After leaving college, he moved to Greenwich Village in New York City, working various jobs and determined to become a writer. His literary ambitions initially focused on poetry and prose until Thornton Wilder encouraged him to turn to theater. In 1958, his first play, "Zoo Story," was published and premiered in Berlin. With his next play, "The Sandbox" in 1959, Albee embodied the American version of the Theater of the Absurd (alongside Beckett, Ionesco, and Jean Genet in Europe), with his radical critique of popular American culture. In 1960, "Zoo Story" was staged in New York. This was followed by plays such as "Fam and Yam," "The American Dream," and "The Death of Bessie Smith." In 1962, his work gained widespread recognition with the success of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," considered his masterpiece and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 1963 (though the prize was not awarded in that category). In 1967, he won the Pulitzer Prize for "A Delicate Balance." He received the Pulitzer Prize again in 1975 for "Seascape" and in 1994 for "Three Tall Women." At the height of his fame, he wrote and directed his own plays, which achieved international acclaim. In 1967, he also established the Edward F. Albee Foundation to support young playwrights at the William Flanagan Center in Montauk, New York. After 1989, he taught theater at the University of Houston. He passed away in Montauk, New York, on September 16, 2016, at the age of 88, eleven years after the death of his partner, sculptor Jonathan Thomas.