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Edward Albee was born March 12, 1928, in Washington D.C., and he was adopted as an infant by Reid Albee, the son of Edward Franklin Albee of the powerful Keith-Albee vaudeville chain. He was brought up in great affluence and sent to select preparatory and military schools. Almost from the beginning he clashed with the strong-minded Mrs. Albee, rebelling against her attempts to make him a success as well as a sportsman and a member of the Larchmont, New York, social set.
Instead, young Albee pursued his interest in the arts, writing macabre and bitter stories and poetry, while associating with artists and intellectuals considered objectionable by Mrs. Albee. He left home when he was 20 and moved to New York's Greenwich Village, where he took to the era's counterculture and avant-garde movements. After using up his paternal grandmother's modest legacy, he took a variety of menial jobs until 1959 when "The Zoo Story" made him a famous playwright, first in Europe, where it premiered in Berlin, and then in New York. This short work together with 1962's full-length "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", a brutal portrait of a hard-drinking academic couple, and 1966's "A Delicate Balance", his first Pulitzer Price-winner, created the mold for American drama for the rest of our century. In 1975, Albee won his second Pulitzer Prize with "Seascape".
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