Celebrated playwright Edward Albee has died at 88 years of age. Considered by many to be America’s greatest living playwright, he penned such classics as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?, The American Dream, and Three Tall Women, among many others. Long-recognized as a master of his craft, he wrote 30 plays and won the coveted Pulitzer-Prize for Drama three times over the course of his long career.
Adopted by a wealthy family with close connections to the old Vaudville tradition (his father owned several theaters,) he felt out of place both at home and at school. He was expelled from two high schools, and left a military academy early. Though he did ultimately graduate from high school, he was eventually expelled from college for skipping classes and failing to comply with chapel attendance requirements—-how times have changed.
Albee knew he wanted to be a writer very early on, and moved to New York City as a very young man, living in the fast-paced and avant-garde Greenwich Village neighborhood, long before gentrification, and then home to struggling artists of all kinds. Working odd jobs to support himself, he tirelessly practiced his art, and gained recognition as a writer fairly early. Openly gay for much of his life, he once said that he wanted to be known not as a gay playwright, but as a playwright who happened to be gay.
Learn more about playwright Edward Albee (Time.com)
Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC0 (public domain image)
