[In the essay below, Heldreth asserts that The Zoo Story demonstrates how "American society has deteriorated into a vicious fantasy, a zoo in which human animals, some real and some imaginary, scream and fight and die."]

Both those who regard The Zoo Story as one of Albee's "more realistic" plays (Woods 224) and those who see it as "part fantasy and part truncated realism" (Dubler 253) tend to focus on the connections with Ibsen and Strindberg.' An alternate approach is to see the play as a precursor of the fuller fantasies embodied in The American Dream and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Dubler asserts, "The common denominator of all incidents alluded to and situations enacted in The American Dream is that they involve private fantasies" (247), and the same evaluation holds true of The Zoo Story. Because Jerry's fantasies have an air of realism about them—Peter says Jerry described people "vividly"—and because Peter's fantasies are standard ones of the middle class, their illusory quality is less obvious than the fantasies in several of Albee's other plays. 2 Yet Peter's fantasy insulates him from the reality of people such as Jerry, and Jerry's fantasy leads him to death.

This theme of fantasy appears in two short stories that appeared before The Zoo Story and may have influenced Albee in writing the play. In 1953, Jean Stafford's "In the Zoo" was published in The New Yorker, and in 1955, Carson McCullers published "A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud"; The Zoo Story was produced in Germany in 1958. These stories have striking parallels with many of the elements and some of the ideas of Albee's one-act play. He was probably familiar with McCullers's work, since he later adapted The Ballad of the Sad Cafe to the stage; he may also have known Stafford's story, since "In the Zoo" received the O. Henry Award, First Prize, in 1955. 3 Noting the similarities between these stories and The Zoo Story may shed some light on the later work.

The initial scene of "In the Zoo" is virtually identical to the set of the play. In Stafford's story, two middle-aged women, Daisy and her unnamed sister, the narrator, are sitting on a park bench in the Denver Zoo, passing the time until the sister's train arrives. As Jerry throughout the play compares people to animals—the zoo animals, Peter's cats and parakeets, the landlady's dog—so the two women note the similarity between the animals they are watching and people they have known as children, and immediately both are plunged into a reverie on their past. Later in the story, they compare Mr. Murphy's pets to people, and the people in Mrs. Placer's boarding house to animals.

As Jerry tells Peter of his childhood and past experiences, so the narrator of "In the Zoo" relates the story of her child-hood and youth. Jerry's mother died when he was between eleven and twelve, and about three weeks later his father was killed by a bus; the parents of the girls died "within a month of each other," when Daisy was ten and the narrator was eight. Jerry moved in with his aunt, who neither drank nor sinned (24), while the girls moved into a boarding house run by Mrs. Placer, who was equally dour and had "old cardboard boxes filled with such things as W.C.T.U. tracts and anti-cigarette literature and newspaper clippings relating to sexual sin in the Christianized islands of the Pacific" (114). Jerry, at the time of the play, lives in a boarding house whose landlady possesses traits of both Mrs. Placer, the girls' guardian, and Mr. Murphy, the drunk Irishman who gives them a dog. Jerry's landlady spies on him (28), while Mrs. Placer has spies all over town and ridicules the girls until "Daisy and I lived in a mesh of lies and evasions, baffled and mean, like rats in a maze" (111). Each afternoon Jerry's landlady drinks a pint of lemon-flavored gin, and Mr. Murphy, the girls' friend, stays drunk most of the time, gradually becoming "enfeebled with gin" (111).

The strongest parallel, however, between the two landladies is their use of fantasy. Jerry's landlady, in her drunken stupor, remembers, with a little urging from him, an affair with Jerry that never took place. Mrs. Placer, ridiculing everything from the girls' boyfriends to their achievements, constantly reshapes the facts brought to her by the girls until they suit her view of the world. The best example of her manipulation of reality is her reaction when Mr. Murphy offers the girls a puppy, a reaction that is first negative as she considers "this murderous, odiferous, drunk, Roman Catholic dog," and then, as the "fantasy spun on, richly and rapidly," (98) she completely reverses herself and sees him as "a pillar of society" (99). Reality is constantly manipulated in the story to fit Mrs. Placer's beliefs. Even her name reflects the children's being placed with her as, according to various critics, Jerry's and Peter's names reflect their parts in the play.

The most obvious connection between the two narratives, however, In the story, is the central position occupied in eachby the dog.⁴ Caesar, who was originally named Laddie and belonged to the girls, has been taken over by Mrs. Placer and turned into a vicious brute who attacks the milkman, the paperboy, the meter man, and even a salesman, whose wound required stitches. He is lustrous black, sleeps in Mrs. Placer's bedroom, and "gulped down a whole pound of hamburger" (110) that Mr. Murphy had poisoned. The dog in The Zoo Story is also black, he attacks Jerry when his territory is intruded upon, and he "gobbled" down a hamburger that Jerry had filled with rat poison. The only significant difference between the two dogs is that Caesar dies from the poison and the other dog, after suffering, recovers.

Other details in the story parallel those in the play. Mr. Murphy plays solitaire with cards that anticipate the regular decks in Jerry's box; the fire chief in Stafford's story, like Jerry, visits prostitutes; on the day of Caesar's death, the narrator announces, "Oh, it was hot that day!" (108), while on the critical day of the play, Jerry says, "It's a hot day" (40); and Mrs. Placer's phrase, "I just have to laugh," repeated by the narrator at the end of Stafford's story, anticipates Peter's uncontrollable hysteria when Jerry tickles him.⁵

Less obvious but more important, however, are the motivational parallels in the two stories. Near the end of Stafford's story, the narrator acknowledges, "You may be sure we did not unlearn those years as soon as we put her [Mrs. Placer] out of sight in the cemetery" (113), and the rest of the narrator's behavior in the story, to the concluding hysterical laughter, bears out her statement: the behavior they were forced to follow has imposed a pattern on their young lives and motivates their adult actions. In her concluding comments on the train, she describes the marijuana she thinks she sees in the fields outside the windows and spins an elaborate fantasy about a priest riding with her on the train. Jerry in The Zoo Story also follows patterns of behavior he learned as he grew up, and these account for much of his motivation.

His philosophy, however, seems taken over almost directly from a character in Carson McCullers's story "A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud," published in 1955, two years after "In the Zoo" and three years before The Zoo Story. This story also has circumstantial parallels with Albee's play. As Peter is accosted in a public park by Jerry, who tells him his life story, so here a young newsboy stops at a diner, a public place, for a cup of coffee, where he is accosted by an old man who describes how his wife had run away ten years before. The old man sought her in "Tulsa, Atlanta, Mobile, Chicago, Cheehaw, Memphis" (101), just as Jerry's mother had left his father for an adulterous trip through the southern states. Both Jerry and the old man act as teachers; and while Leo, the diner owner, refers to the old man as a "prominent transient" (99), Jerry refers to himself as a "permanent tran sient" (37).

Yet these patterns of similarity are less important than the thematic one, the nature of love. Like Jerry, the old man attempts to impose his view of life upon an unresponsive audience, and he anticipates Jerry's philosophical statement on how one should learn to love. The old man tells the boy that at first he wanted only to find his wife but, as time went on, he forgot what she looked like. He learned to love objects he found in the road, then a goldfish, a street full of people, a bird in the sky, a tree, a rock, a cloud, or the newsboy that he is now addressing. Jerry also believes that he must learn to deal "with a bed, with a cockroach, … some day, with people" (34-35). Each character states that the ability to love must be learned in a gradual ascension from simple inanimate objects to human beings. Each main character ends by declaring his love; the old man for the newsboy, and Jerry, in his perverse fantasy, for Peter.

These two stories, together with the embedded narratives in Albee's play, suggest answers to some questions that, within the explicit structure of the play, remain unanswered. The play describes four periods in Jerry's life: his childhood and adolescence, including the death of his family and his first sexual experiences; the recent conflict at his rooming house, known in the play as "The Story of Jerry and the Dog"; his experience at the zoo earlier in the day during which the play takes place; and finally, the central event of the play, his encounter with Peter in the park. Each section is clearly delineated except for the third, the experience at the zoo. The importance of this section, however, is emphasized by the play's title and Jerry's opening line, "I've been to the zoo.… I said, I've been to the zoo. MISTER, I've been to the zoo.…!" Throughout the play, Jerry reminds Peter and the audience of this event's significance with lines such as, "Do you want to know what happened at the zoo or not?" (39). This motif sets the audience up for a climatic description, but it is one that never appears in the play. Jerry begins to tell the zoo story, but then abruptly starts the fight with Peter. The four narratives of the play parallel each other so carefully, however, that by examining the other three, together with the short stories described earlier, we can extrapolate and determine what happened at the zoo and why Jerry's ideas of love are so intertwined with death. The four narratives reinforce each other through four major themes: love, death, territorial conflicts, and past conditioning that leads to fantasy.

Jerry presents his narratives quite carefully, and although he begins with the incident at the zoo, he quickly shifts to questions about his location; later he starts again to tell of the zoo but veers away: "let me tell you some other things" (27). The implication is that these "other things" will illuminate the incident at the zoo to the extent that it will not need to be explicitly recounted.

Among these "other things" which Jerry will tell are his first experiences with physical love and death. His most extensive physical relationship, he tells us, occurred when he was fifteen; for eleven days, he had a homosexual relationship with a park superintendent's son (25).' Jerry tells nothing about why the relationship ended after eleven days. Did the boy move away? Were they discovered and forbidden to meet again? Or did the superintendent's son, like so many other boys in Albee's plays, die—literally, like the mis-treated twin in American Dream, or figuratively, like the imaginary son or the boy who drank "bergin" in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Whatever his fate, he simply disappears from the account.

Such disappearances and deaths were common in Jerry's early life. When he was ten, his mother ran away, and after a year-long absence, she died in Alabama (24). His father brought the body home in late December, and after a two-week drinking binge, his father was killed by a city bus. Jerry moved in with his mother's sister for seven or eight years, and then she died on the afternoon of his high school graduation. With the possible exception of his affair with the Greek boy, every relationship Jerry has experienced has ended in death.

Nor is Jerry's concern with territory, which culminates in his takeover of the park bench, surprising. Homeless, obligated to see his aunt's home first as "her apartment" and then as "my apartment" (24), he now has no turf to call his own. Further, each family member died out of home territory—the mother in Alabama, the father in a city street, and the aunt on the stairs to her apartment. None of the characters die in their own houses or beds. The pattern seems clear, and Jerry learns it: venturing out of one's territory is dangerous and perhaps deadly. This pattern will be repeated when Jerry ventures into the dog's domain at the boarding house and when he tries to take over Peter's bench in the park. Like the girls of "In the Zoo," events in Jerry's childhood are shaping him to react in a predictable way.

After Jerry describes his early life, he assures Peter that despite his youthful homosexual experience, he now loves "the little ladies" (25). Yet, other lines of dialogue indicate Jerry's continued interest in men. He tells Peter he doesn't talk to many people except in phrases such as "keep your hands to yourself, buddy" (17). He also admits his women "aren't pretty little ladies" (34-35). Does this mean that his women are fat and ugly, probably whores? Their reluctance to be photographed (25) seems to fit such an interpretation; yet he is filled with fury over this fact, and his comment on the deck of pornographic playing cards, that fantasy becomes a substitute for real life, may mean that these little ladies are men whom he sees once and then, in guilt and anger, never sees again. The next phrase in this particular speech, which begins an attempt to show how a man must learn to deal with things, speaks of "making money with your body which is an act of love" (35). Jerry seems to be denying, except for an early experience, his homosexual desires and is having compulsive one-night stands with either prostitutes or men who he pretends to himself are women. He also denies his own prostitution. Despite his comment that people must know the effects of their actions (33), Jerry cannot face himself or his actions: a relationship with a mirror is "too hard, that's one of the last steps. With … toilet paper … that's a mirror, too; always check bleeding" (34). He cannot accept his own image, his homo-sexuality, or even his animalistic nature, which manifests itself in the blood on the toilet paper, so he maintains his distance from everyone, including himself.

Jerry cannot avoid his landlady, however, in the next section, the story of Jerry and the dog; she presses her body against him and Jerry resorts to fantasy, perhaps of the type he is even now telling Peter. When the landlady attempts to seduce him, he lies to her about what they had done in her room in earlier meetings and she is satisfied. His use here of fantasy is the reverse of his earlier statement about the pornographic playing cards, which for boys are "a substitute for a real experience," but adults "use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy" (27). His statement criticizes a world that cannot live up to his fantasy expectations and indicates a desire for another relationship as valid as that with the Greek boy. His later sexual relationships seem to be merely experiences through which he can recapture, in fantasy, the ecstasy of this earlier love. The comment about the pornographic playing cards functions as a metaphor for Jerry's entire outlook on life. Unable to face the life he lives, Jerry shapes reality into something more meaningful; he constantly reevaluates the past, turning it into a pattern that he only now perceives. For example, only after Jerry has tried to kill the dog and failed does he begin to rationalize, telling Peter that he really wanted the dog to live and that the experience was a learning process. After Peter expresses horror, Jerry acknowledges, in an echo of his statement about the pornographic cards, that such real-life experiences make good fantasies to read about (29).

More significant, however, than the landlady is her dog, and Jerry reminds us that the story of the dog is associated with his visit to the zoo and the park (30). The landlady's large, black dog, all black except for bloodshot eyes and a red sore on its forepaw, "almost always has an erection.… That's red, too" (31). The dog with his aggression and his erection is a masculine image who contrasts with cats, a feminine image: the man selling hamburgers asks if the meat is for his pussycat, but Jerry denies pussycats, which earlier he had identified with wives and daughters. Yet the dog, like the little ladies, appears as a dual sexual image, for as he eats the hamburger that Jerry offers, he makes "sounds in his throat like a woman" (31). The dog's color, black with some red, is the color of death.

Jerry's relationship with the dog parallels his attitude toward himself. He remarks to Peter, "Her dog? I thought it was my … No. No. You're right. It is her dog." If this dog, "Malevolence with an erection," is seen as Jerry's sexual drive, his dog, then his initial love for it parallels his early love affair, and his attempt to kill the dog is a metaphor for his attempt to destroy his sexuality, an attempt to deny his homosexuality. But he cannot destroy his sexual side, and the dog survives, albeit somewhat weakened: "I had tried to love and I had tried to kill, and both had been unsuccessful by themselves." (34). This failed attempt at destroying the animalistic side of his nature anticipates the successful and final attempt at death in the park.

Jerry's monologue following this story of the dog is virtually a gloss on the old man's "science" of love in the McCullers's story (103-4). When the boy asks the old man, "Have you fallen in love with a woman again?" the old man replies, "I am not quite ready yet." Jerry apparently is ready, for after the speech about love, he compliments Peter, says he's not leaving, and begins to tickle Peter.

The territorial concerns in the dog story are fairly obvious. Jerry ventures into what he thinks is neutral territory in the rooming house, but the dog regards the hall as his territory, and the conflict leads to violence and then attempted murder as Jerry fights for the right to reach the stairs to his room.

Jerry has promised Peter to tell next about what happened at the zoo (29), and now he begins. The zoo experience has traumatized Jerry, for in his first conversation with Peter, after commenting on the weather, he returns to his original subject, saying "I've been to the zoo" (15). Jerry carefully orchestrates his account, telling Peter, "I went to the zoo to find out more about the way people exist with animals" (40).

Jerry's motivation reminds us of his attempt to establish contact with the dog, and his account of the zoo recalls many of the earlier themes. The animals and people remind us of the landlady's dog, Peter's parakeets and cats, and all the people enclosed in the boarding house where Jerry lives; the children remind us of Peter's two daughters and no sons and of Jerry's orphaned childhood; the animal stench brings to mind the landlady; the vendors selling balloons and ice cream call to mind the man from whom Jerry bought the hamburger; and the barking seals and screaming birds echo the masculine/feminine dichotomy that runs throughout the play: the seals, barking, are doglike and masculine; the birds, slang for women in England and associated with daughters and disease, are feminine. The last description of the zoo in this section is, "the lion keeper comes into the lion cage… to feed one of the lions" (40). Then Jerry begins harassing Peter into the fight that ends the play. But Jerry had earlier stated what happened when a person ventured into territory not his own; his mother died, his father died, his aunt died, and he was attacked by a dog. Thus, when the lion keeper goes into the cage to feed the lion, the pattern of Jerry feeding the dog will be repeated: it will eat the food and then go for him. The lion was evidently successful in its surprise attack on the keeper because Jerry has said, "Wait until you see the expression on his face" (19). It is the attack on the zoo keeper and his face that will be seen on TV that night and read about in the paper the next day. It is also the event that reinforces all of Jerry's earlier beliefs and starts him walking northerly to the park where he suicidally invades Peter's territory.

Each of the directions mentioned in the play has symbolic significance and is associated with a character. Because Peter lives between Lexington and Third Avenue on 74th Street, in the east 70's, he embodies the East, with culture, sophistication, and the other characteristics of the eastern seaboard. Jerry, in contrast, lives in a rooming house "on the upper west side … Central Park West; I live on the top floor; rear; west." By associating himself with the West, Jerry links himself with the more masculine western image. Jerry states early in the play, "I don't like the West side of the park that much." When Peter asks, "Why?" Jerry replies, "I don't know" (14). The reason is given obliquely later in the play. Peter threatens to call a policeman, but Jerry says,"They're all over on the west side of the park chasing fairies" (43). Jerry's repression of his homosexuality is disturbed by the blatant displays so obvious in the west side of the park. If he had accepted his sexuality, Jerry would have accepted the west side of the park as his home turf, just as his boarding house is on the upper west side (22), but he has suppressed his feelings so much he no longer knows why he dislikes that side of the park.

South is associated with Jerry's mother, for her journey after abandoning the boy and his father was through the southern states, until her death. North is associated with cold, detachment, frozen bodies and minds, and ultimately death. Jerry emphasizes his mother being a "northern stiff," and he describes how "I've been walking north … but not due north." He is moving toward death, but circuitously, just as he slowly leads up to the story of the zoo. As the boy said about the old man in "A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud," "He sure has done a lot of traveling" (105).

Jerry is now in a foreign environment: like his mother, he has gone "a long distance out of the way to come back a short distance correctly." He had made a journey south that morning to the village in order to walk back north, pausing at the zoo, but he has not yet reached the safety of his area of town. His mother's return north as a corpse anticipates his own journey north to death. Out of his home territory, as he tries to take over Peter's bench, Jerry sets the stage for disaster.

The last major section, the conflict in the park, ties together the strands that have been carefully developed. After dropping his account of what happened at the zoo, Jerry begins to tickle Peter in a displaced sexual advance: tickling is traditionally associated with sexuality because of the loss of control and the physical intimacy involved. Peter is nervous because tickling is looked upon with suspicion among adult members of the same sex. The advance is a part of Jerry's efforts to make Peter over into the kind of person he is looking for. Jerry has walked straight from the zoo "until I found you … or somebody" (48), but he has also ridiculed Peter for his lack of masculinity. Jerry is looking for a human equivalent of the dog and the lion, but Peter, on first impression, does not fit the image. Jerry has already ridiculed Peter's marriage, the daughters he has instead of sons, and the daughters' birds and cats. Peter's profession as a textbook editor and his decision to have no more children, implying emasculation, have allied him with the cultured, passive, scholarly, feminine point of view. Failing, as he knew he would, in his attempt to reach Peter through intimacy, Jerry now tries to reach him, as he did the dog, through violence. 7 Jerry shapes the reality he has found until it fulfills his death fantasy. Conditioned by experience to believe that love leads to pain and death, that sex is a one-time affair," and that people who venture into alien territory are in grave danger, Jerry sets up Peter to act out a fantasy of love and death; in it he will kill the animalistic self that, symbolically, he failed to destroy when he poisoned the dog.

In the conflict that follows, he goads Peter to a fury in which Peter loses his temper, becomes revitalized, seizes the knife, and holds it in front of him. The phallic image is obvious. Jerry, however, has learned his lesson well: he is the outsider intruding into the alien territory; he has failed to accommodate himself to society's norms; and he is repelled by the sexual and physical sides of his nature that refuse to stay locked in cages. Therefore, he must die, and he rushes upon the knife. In the stage directions, Albee specifies for tableau of "Jerry impaled on the knife at the end of Peter's still firm arm" (47). The themes of perverse sexual love, of death, of reality shaped into fantasy, and of the price paid by the outsider are all embodied in this climactic image. Then the two men scream.

Jerry now explains to Peter, "Now you know all about what happened at the zoo … the face I told you about… my face, the face you see right now" (48). Some critics have interpreted this passage literally—that it is Jerry who will be featured in the TV story, but he is speaking metaphorically. He is in the park, several blocks from the zoo, and Peter's understanding of what happened at the zoo, if he does understand, comes from Jerry's parallel actions. Like the lion keeper, Jerry came into the lion's home area and, even though this lion had to be revitalized, Jerry directed the part and the actions as he felt they must inevitably go. And when he says "my face," he again is speaking metaphorically, indicating that the agony on the lion keeper's face and that on his face are identical, for earlier he had referred to "the expression on his face" (19).

Like the old man in the McCullers's story, Jerry wants to learn to love, but what he has learned about himself and love is unacceptable. Like the girls in the Stafford story who "lived in a mesh of lies and evasions, baffled and mean, like rats in a maze" (111), he is reduced to ritual fantasy. His final action is inevitable because it came from within: "Could I have planned all this?… I think I did" (48).

In conclusion, Mrs. Placers's fantasies enabled her, in Stafford's story, to deal with a world she would not accept, one that denied her the status she demanded. Unable to tolerate the rigidity she imposed on their childhoods, the girls also retreated into fantasy, a habit that continued into their adulthoods. Jerry also faced a world that rejected him, and he manipulated reality until it fit his destruction fantasy: he was unable to learn to love; he was unable to accept his own physical nature and his homosexuality; and failing, he chose death. He deliberately set up a pattern of destruction that imitated his mother's one-year destructive trip, for he went south and then came north to death; he orchestrated his own death as carefully as he planned the death of the dog; and he used his death as a method both of revitalizing Peter and symbolically restoring Peter's virility through violent action. But at the end of the play, the audience is left with the vision of the zoo, in which people are alienated from one another in rooms like cages, and in which a sexual caress has been displaced to a knife embedded in the chest. As Albee stated in more detail in The Sandbox, The Death of Bessie Smith, The American Dream, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, American society has deteriorated into a vicious fantasy, a zoo in which human animals, some real and some imaginary, scream and fight and die.

Notes

¹William M. Force summarizes, somewhat cynically, the major critical positions on the play.

²Dubler notes in Genet's The Balcony that "private fantasy is achieved only through the conscientious accumulation of realistic details" (54), details that Jerry generously supplies. In conversation, however, Albee stated to me that Jerry was a "liar."

³Albee acknowledged knowing Stafford's work but refused to comment on the connection between either of the stories and his play, a stand consistent with his public discussions of his writings.

⁴Levine cites a parallel between Jerry's dog and a black dog in Thomas Mann's "Tobias Mindernickel," in which the main character stabs the dog to death, as Peter does Jerry. Albee's use of a character named Tobias in A Delicate Balance may tie in with the same story.

⁵Albee also uses such uncontrollable laughter for the young man who kills his father in Virginia Woolf.

⁶Making the boy "Greek" may be a homosexual pun.

⁷No one has accepted Jerry's statement that Peter was expecting to meet another man in the park. Yet such an assignation, whether Peter was actually married or was lying, would explain his being in the park regularly ("I sit on this bench almost every Sunday afternoon, in good weather. It's secluded here …" [41]), his determination to protect his meeting place, and his reason for not leaving earlier, a passive stance that many critics see as unbelievable.

⁸Brown (1969) accurately states, "Sex in Albee very rarely, if ever, is something done out of love; it is a weapon; it is a vile appetite" (49).

Works Cited

Albee, Edward. "The American Dream" and "The Zoo Story." New York: New American Library, 1961.

Brown, Daniel R. "Albee's Targets." Satire Newsletter (Spring 1969): 46-52.

Dubler, Walter. "O'Neill, Wilder, Albee: The Uses of Fantasy in Modern American Drama." Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1964.

Force, William M. "The What Story? or Who's Who at Zoo?" Studies in the Humanities 1 (1969-70): 47-53.

Irwin, Robert. "The 'Teaching Emotion' in the Ending of The Zoo Story." 6 (1976): 6-8.

Levine, Mordecai H. "Albee's Liebestod." College Language Association Journal 10 (March 1967): 252-55.

McCullers, Carson. Collected Short Stories and the Novel "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. " Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955.

Ramsey, Roger. "Jerry's Northerly Madness." Notes on Contemporary Literature 1 (1971): 7-8.

Stafford, Jean. Bad Characters. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1964.

Woods, Linda. "Isolation and the Barriers of Language in The Zoo Story." (September 1968): 224-31.

Zindel, Paul, and Loree Yerby. "Interview with Edward Albee." Wagner Literary Magazine 3 (1962): 1-10.