Albee, Edward [Franklin]
Albee, Edward [Franklin]( 1928– ),after a troubled youth came in his early thirties to the beginning of his career as playwright. He quickly became a leading figure of the new drama of the absurd that mingles the realistic with fantasy to present a savagely satirical attack on spiritual sterility, blandness, conformity, and hypocrisy, and to summon up with deep feeling the tragedy of alienation. His first play, The Zoo Story (Berlin, 1959; New York, 1960), a one-act drama, presents a young homosexual who, hating both the world he can't live in and the one he does inhabit, manages to trick an ordinary, middle-aged, and innocent stranger whom he encounters in New York's Central Park into killing him. Another short play, The Death of Bessie Smith (Berlin, 1960; New York, 1961), treats the agony of the black blues singer's death after an auto accident as the counterpointed background for a horrid fight involving a nurse, an intern,...
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