Edward Albee

The adoption agency had him for two weeks. At 18 days he was in Larchmont, in a Tudor house with servants and a library of classics he was scolded for taking down, because the books were there for show. His adoptive father Reed Albee had inherited the Keith-Albee vaudeville fortune, better than 400 theatres. His adoptive mother Frances was tall, cold and 12 years younger than her husband. Edward knew he was adopted by the age of six. Lawrenceville expelled him, Valley Forge Military Academy dismissed him inside a year, Choate finally held him, and Trinity College threw him out in 1947 for skipping classes and chapel. He left home that same year, or was thrown out. Neither parent heard from him for 20 years.

He took a typewriter from the Western Union office where he worked and wrote The Zoo Story in three weeks, a present to himself for turning 30. Every New York producer passed. It opened in West Berlin on September 28, 1959, on a double bill with Krapp's Last Tape. Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller had built their plays inside the frame of the realistic American family. Albee took the frame apart: a couple who invent a son and then kill him, a suburban marriage interrupted by two talking sea lizards, one woman played at once by three actresses.

The 1963 drama jurors, John Mason Brown and John Gassner, recommended Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. The Pulitzer advisory board met on April 25, voted it down as failing the terms of the award, and gave no drama prize at all that year. One member called it filthy. Another had voted against it without seeing it. Brown and Gassner quit. He won three Pulitzers later, for A Delicate Balance, Seascape and Three Tall Women, and never one for that play. The wilderness came after. From The Lady from Dubuque in 1980, which closed after 12 performances, through a disowned Lolita and The Man Who Had Three Arms, which Frank Rich called a temper tantrum in two acts, the reviews were savage. He drank hard, and later said his partner Jonathan Thomas kept him from drinking himself to death.

Three Tall Women, built out of his adoptive mother at 92, 52 and 26, opened off Broadway in January 1994, and the critics who had buried him wrote him back in. He was openly gay and rejected the category: taking a Lambda Literary lifetime award in 2011, he said he was not a gay writer but a writer who happens to be gay. He died at Montauk on September 16, 2016. His will ordered his unfinished manuscripts destroyed. In 2017 his estate denied a Portland company the rights to Virginia Woolf over the casting of a Black actor as Nick, though Albee had approved an all-Black Howard University production in 2001.

Edward Albee's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Zoo Story other
  Written in three weeks and premiered in West Berlin because no New York producer would take it 1959
• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? other
  664 performances, the Tony for best play, and no Pulitzer 1962
• A Delicate Balance other
  His first Pulitzer, awarded in 1967, which some critics read as an apology for 1963 1966
• Seascape other
  A married couple and two talking sea lizards. Second Pulitzer, and the first of his own premieres that he directed 1975
• Three Tall Women other
  His adoptive mother at 92, 52 and 26. Premiered in Vienna, third Pulitzer in 1994 1991
• The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? other
  Tony Award for best play at 74, 39 years after the first one 2002

• March 12, 1928 aged 0 Born in Washington, D.C. and given to an adoption agency two weeks later His biological father had left his mother, Louise Harvey. He was registered as Edward Harvey.
• February 1, 1929 aged 0 Formally adopted by Reed and Frances Albee of Larchmont, New York He had been living in their house since he was 18 days old.
• 1947 aged ~19 Expelled from Trinity College and out of the family house the same year Accounts differ on whether he left or was thrown out. Twenty years of silence followed either way.
• 1958 aged ~30 Writes The Zoo Story in three weeks as a 30th birthday present to himself On a typewriter taken from the Western Union office where he delivered telegrams.
• September 28, 1959 aged 31 The Zoo Story premieres at the Schiller Theater Werkstatt in West Berlin On a double bill with the German premiere of Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape.
• October 13, 1962 aged 34 Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opens at the Billy Rose Theatre It ran 664 performances with Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill.
• May 6, 1963 aged 35 The Pulitzer board announces no drama award for the year Its drama jurors had recommended the play. Both resigned within the hour.
• January 27, 1994 aged 65 Three Tall Women opens off Broadway at the Vineyard Theatre It ran 582 performances and won him a third Pulitzer.
• September 16, 2016 aged 88 Dies at his house in Montauk at 88 His will left the estate to his foundation and ordered the unfinished plays destroyed.

• Tennessee Williams 1911–1983
  Playwright whose A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof defined American theater. broke from the realism of
• Arthur Miller 1915–2005
  Playwright whose Death of a Salesman and The Crucible are cornerstones of American drama. broke from the realism of
• Eugene O'Neill 1888–1953
  Playwright whose psychologically complex dramas established serious American theater on the world stage. compared to by the Pulitzer jury
• Elizabeth Taylor 1932–2011
  Two-time Academy Award winner who turned the largest fame in the world into the first mass-audience campaign against AIDS. starred in the film of his play
• Truman Capote 1924–1984
  Writer of Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood — an early nonfiction novel. adapted
• Bessie Smith 1892–1937
  Leading blues recording artist of the 1920s known as the Empress of the Blues. wrote a play about