Albee, Edward (1928-2016), was a major American playwright who used a wide variety of styles ranging from realism to fantasy. He wrote about the need for human contact and the illusions his characters embrace to face the meaninglessness of existence. Albee gained international fame with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), a moving examination of power struggles and the combination of cruelty and love in marriage.
Albee won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for A Delicate Balance (1966), a study of family relationships and friendships set in an emotionally sterile suburban atmosphere. He won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Seascape (1975), a fantasy about a middle-aged couple’s ability to move beyond a fear of change and the unknown. He received a third Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for Three Tall Women (world premiere in Vienna in 1991), about an aged woman’s encounter with mortality.
Albee’s first plays were short, probing dramas about the materialism, complacency, and alienation he saw in American society. They were influenced by the Theater of the Absurd, a European drama movement of the 1950’s. These plays include The Zoo Story (1959), The Death of Bessie Smith (1960), The Sandbox (1960), and The American Dream (1961). Later, he wrote Homelife as a companion piece to The Zoo Story. These two one-act plays were combined into Peter and Jerry (2004), later retitled At Home at the Zoo. Among his other plays are Tiny Alice (1964), a symbolic religious drama; The Play About the Baby (1998), in which an older couple strips away the illusions of a younger couple; and The Occupant (2002), about the famous sculptor Louise Nevelson. The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2002) is a dark comedy about the mysterious workings of the heart and the necessity for tolerance. Me, Myself & I (2008) is a farce about the shifting meanings of language. Albee’s essays on the theater were collected in Stretching My Mind (2005). 
Edward Franklin Albee was born on March 12, 1928, in Washington, D.C. He died on Sept. 16, 2016.
