Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? | Author Biography

Edward Albee, numbered among the United States's most acclaimed and controversial playwrights, was born March 12, 1928. As the adopted son of Reed and Frances Albee, heirs to the fortune of American theater manager Edward Franklin Albee, he had an early introduction to the theatre. He began attending performances at the age of six and wrote a three-act sex farce when he was twelve. Albee attended several private and military schools and enrolled briefly at Connecticut's Trinity College from 1946-47. He held a variety of jobs over the next decade, working as a writer for WNYC-radio, an office boy for an advertising agency, a record salesman, and a messenger for Western Union. He wrote both fiction and poetry as a young man, achieving some limited success, and at the age of thirty returned to writing plays, making an impact with his one-act The Zoo Story (1959). Over the next few years Albee continued to satirize American social values with a series of important one-act plays: The Death of Bessie Smith (1960), the savagely expressionistic The Sandbox (1960), and The American Dream (1961).

Edward Albee at Boston's Colonial Theatre
Edward Albee outside of the Colonial Theatre in Boston, where he directed a 1976 production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Albee came fully into the national spotlight with his first full-length play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). The play quickly developed a reputation as one of the most challenging works of the contemporary American theatre, even if some critics faulted it as morbid and serf-indulgent. Albee has yet to make as large an impact with any of his subsequent plays, many of which have failed commercially and elicited scathing reviews. At the same time, however, the playwright has been commended for his commitment to theatrical experimentation. Albee's 1966 play A Delicate Balance, in which a troubled middle-aged couple examine their relationship during a prolonged visit by two close friends, earned him a Pulitzer Prize which many felt was a belated attempt by the Pulitzer committee to honor Albee for Virginia Woolf. Albee won a second Pulitzer for his 1975 play Seascape, in which two couples—one human, the other a pair of intelligent lizard-like creatures that have been driven from the sea by the process of evolution—discuss the purpose of existence. Albee has also continued to write experimental one-acts, including the paired plays Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (1968), and his 1977 work Listening: A Chamber Play. He received a third Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his play Three Tall Women.

Albee has also adapted many works of fiction for the stage, including the novels The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Carson McCullers Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Early in his career, he also collaborated on the opera Bartleby, based on a story by Herman Melville. Albee has applied his theatrical talents to directing productions of his own plays and has also served as co-producer at the New Playwrights Unit Workshop, co-director of the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, founder of the William Flanagan Center for Creative Persons in Mountauk, NY, and member of the National Endowment for the Arts grant-giving council. He has lectured extensively at college campuses and visited Russia and several Latin American countries on cultural exchanges through the U.S. State Department.