Edward Albee

Born in Virginia and adopted shortly thereafter into the wealthy Albee family, Edward Albee never felt fully at home in his adoptive family. As he bounced from school to school throughout his teens, racking up expulsions from military academies and private schools around the country, he struggled against authority. He ultimately graduated from the prestigious high school Choate Rosemary Hall, but at Trinity College in Connecticut, he was expelled again. Albee moved to New York’s Greenwich Village, a bohemian epicenter of arts and culture, where he began composing plays which criticized American society. Albee, though openly homosexual, never considered himself a gay writer but rather “a writer who happen[ed] to be gay.” Nevertheless, his plays often exposed and lampooned the dark side of traditional heterosexual unions and the simmering unrest just below the surface of the idyllic American family. His best-known works include the 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which has endured as a hallmark of contemporary American theater, as well as The Zoo Story, Three Tall Women, and The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? Albee was the winner of numerous awards including the 1963 and 2002 Tony Awards for Best Play, the 1967, 1975, and 1994 Pulitzer Prizes for Drama, and a 1996 National Medal of Arts. Albee died in 2016 in his home in Montauk, NY. With lifetime achievement awards from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the Drama Desk Awards, and the Tony Awards, Albee remains, indisputably, one of the seminal and foundational voices in modern American theater.