Edward Albee Profile

America's greatest living playwright, Edward Albee exploded onto the theater scene at the end of the 1950s with plays that foreshadowed the turbulence of the decades to come. Adopted as an infant, he rebelled against his socially prominent adoptive family, and fled to Greenwich Village to pursue a literary career. His 1959 play The Zoo Story and 1960's The Death of Bessie Smith won him an early reputation as a fearless observer of human alienation and the American scene.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf provoked an unprecedented controversy in 1962 when the trustees of the Pulitzer Prize Committee overrode the judgment of their own drama jury to deny Albee the award, but Albee's unblinking portrait of a tortured marriage has long since become an undisputed classic of world drama. The Pulitzer committee soon honored Albee for another family drama, A Delicate Balance, in 1966, and awarded him a second prize for Seascape in 1975.

While the Broadway stage turned away from serious drama in the 1980s, Albee ignored the fads of the moment and maintained his own high standards. Three Tall Women enjoyed a sold-out New York run in 1994 and earned him his third Pulitzer. His 2002 success, The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?, once again demonstrated his unique gift for treating the most unusual and disturbing matter with clear-eyed humor and humanity. And more than 40 years after its premiere, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was back on Broadway, as powerful as ever.