Albee, Edward Franklin

Albee, Edward Franklin (1928- ), American playwright, whose most successful plays focus on familial relationships. Albee was born on March 12, 1928, in Washington, D.C., and adopted as an infant by the American theatre executive Reed A. Albee of the Keith-Albee chain of vaudeville and film theatres. Albee attended a number of preparatory schools and, for a short time, Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

In 1958 Albee wrote his first one-act play, The Zoo Story (first performed 1959), in three weeks. Among his subsequent 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 for drama. For Seascape (1975), Albee won his second Pulitzer Prize. His early stage works are marked by themes typical of the Theatre of the Absurd, in which characters suffer from an inability or unwillingness to communicate meaningfully or to sympathize or empathize with one another.

Albee’s later works include The Lady from Dubuque (first performed 1980), an adaptation (1981) of Lolita by the Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov, The Man Who Had Three Arms (1982), Marriage Play (1987), Fragments (1993), The Play About the Baby (1998), The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? (2002), Peter and Jerry (2004)—an expansion of his first play The Zoo Story, incorporating the companion play Homelife; and Me, Myself and I (2008). In 1994 he received a third Pulitzer Prize, for Three Tall Women (1991).