Three Tall Women | Author Biography

Born in 1928, Albee was adopted by Reed and Frances Albee, a wealthy couple involved in the theater. He was a precocious writer, composing poetry at the age of six and a play at twelve. As a teenager, he left home when his parents disapproved of his sexual preference; this confrontation would appear later in his plays, in particular Three Tall Women.

Edward Albee
Edward Albee

Albee’s first one-act play, The Zoo Story, (1958), garnered comparisons with the works of Tennessee Williams and Eugene Ionesco. Subsequent works such as The Death of Bessie Smith (1960), The Sandbox (1960), and The American Dream (1962) earned Albee a place among the top avant-garde writers of the day.

Without doubt, Albee’s best-known work is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf(1962). In this three-act drama, a middle-aged, hard-drinking couple argues and complains about their miserable lives. Critics suggested autobiographical motives in Albee’s depiction of George and Martha, the feuding husband and wife, and welcomed the play as an invigorating exploration of the troubled lives of American families. The play was turned into a film starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in 1966. That same year, Albee earned the first of three Pulitzer Prizes for A Delicate Balance.

During the 1970s and 1980s, he produced a string of notable failures that included Box and Quotations from Mao Tse-Tung (1969), All Over (1971), and The Lady from Dubuque (1980). The only play during this period that received a generally favorable response was Seascape, for which he won a second Pulitzer Prize in 1975.

While his plays remained popular on university stages and in regional theaters around the country, Albee seemed like a professional outcast. During this time he continued to write, and taught the craft of playwriting at the University of Houston in Texas. Then, in the early 1990s, he earned his third Pulitzer Prize as well as widespread critical and popular acclaim for Three Tall Women. In 1993 the Signature Theatre in Manhattan devoted an entire season to Albee’s plays.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of the Arts for his distinguished career. Critic Robert Brustein noted in The New Republic, ‘‘His late career is beginning to resemble O’Neill’s, another dramatist who wrote his greatest plays after having been rejected and abandoned by the culture. Happily, unlike O’Neill, he may not have to wait for death to rehabilitate him.’’