This newest blog entry is comprised of the introduction of my last term paper on Edward Albee, a contemporary American playwright. I enjoyed the work on this paper because I like Albee's plays and have a deep respect for his person and work. If you have never read (or even better) seen any of his plays, you should keep your eyes open for performances near you.
Edward Albee is probably one of the most controversial, misunderstood and underestimated playwrights of the twentieth century. He landed enormous hits with his works Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The American Dream but a lot of his later plays have not re-established this early success, which is not to say that he is not a highly decorated writer. In 1967, Albee received his first Pulitzer Price for A Delicate Balance, and eight years later his second for Seascape. It took him nearly twenty years to receive another Pulitzer Price for Three Tall Women in 1994. Furthermore the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters awarded him with the Gold Medal in Drama in 1980 and in 1996 he received the Kennedy Center Honors as well as the National Medal of Arts. In 2005 Albee received one of the biggest honors in show business, the Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement.[1]
Already at a very young age Albee had an unusually high interest in writing and tried himself in different genres like poetry and prose fiction with nearly no success. Thornton Wilder, the American playwright and novelist, was a close friend of the Albee family at the time and suggested early on to Edward to become a playwright. Albee remembers: “He’d read my poetry and tell me to be a playwright, to save poetry from me.”[2] For the first thirty years of his life his writing was fruitless until he decided one day, in dire need of money, to write a drama. After several weeks of hard work Albee emerged from his apartment with The Zoo Story, his first play to have a major impact on his career as a writer. The playwright commented this event himself by saying that “something very, very interesting happened with the writing of that play. I didn’t discover suddenly that I was a playwright; I discovered that I had been a playwright all my life, but didn’t know it because I hadn’t written plays... And so when I wrote The Zoo Story, I was able to start practicing my ‘nature’ fully.”[3] As an infant, having been abandoned at birth, Albee was adopted by the millionaires Reed and Frances Albee of Larchmont, New York, a family with theatrical background. He was often surrounded by writers and other people from show business making him familiar with the theatre at an early age. Albee’s youth can best be described as “troubled”. He got expelled from multiple preparatory schools and then graduated from Chaote, a prep school in Connecticut, where his first literary works – short stories, poems and a play – were published in the Chaote Literary Magazine. Even though he later attended a college, he never graduated. Between 1948 and 1958 Albee worked a lot of different jobs which left him unsatisfied and without a career. Albee then once again took up writing by borrowing some paper from a Western Union office where he worked and finally came up with The Zoo Story. “Three weeks later, some fifty sheets of yellow paper had become a play, and I had become a playwright.”[4] Up to today he has written 31 plays.
[1] The Edward F. Albee Foundation: http://www.albeefoundation.org/Welcome.html
[2] Edward Albee: A Casebook. p.141
[3] Understanding Edward Albee. p.4
[4] Understanding Edward Albee. p.5-6
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