Edward Albee

Born on March 12, 1928, in Washington, D.C., Edward Albee was adopted at eighteen days old by Reed and Frances Albee, whose family had made its fortune in a chain of vaudeville theaters. He grew up wealthy in Larchmont, New York, attended prep schools from which he was repeatedly expelled, and endured a cold relationship with his adoptive mother that would supply the emotional architecture of his greatest work. He left home as a teenager and spent his twenties in Greenwich Village, working as a telegram delivery boy for Western Union while writing poetry and an unpublished novel. At thirty he composed The Zoo Story (1958) in three weeks on a typewriter at work; the play premiered in Berlin in 1959 before transferring to off-Broadway, and its startling portrait of two strangers on a Central Park bench announced a ferocious new voice in American drama. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), a four-character night of psychological warfare between a history professor, his wife, and a younger couple, ran for 664 performances on Broadway and was adapted into the landmark 1966 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. The Pulitzer jury recommended it for the prize, but the advisory board overruled them, awarding no drama prize that year and provoking two jury members to resign in protest. Albee won the Pulitzer three other times, for A Delicate Balance (1967), Seascape (1975), and Three Tall Women (1994), the last a transparent reckoning with his adoptive mother. He taught playwriting for decades, insisted on attending rehearsals of every major revival, and died on September 16, 2016, at his home in Montauk, New York, at the age of eighty-eight.

In a Greenwich Village bar in the 1950s, Albee saw a line soaped across the washroom mirror: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Some drinker's pun on the Disney song about the big bad wolf. He kept it. Years later it titled the play that made him, and the joke entered the language.