Pulitzer Prize-Winning Playwright Edward Albee Dead at 88

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee died Friday at the age of 88.

Albee was one of the last of the great American playwrights of the 20th century, standing alongside other literary pillars as Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.

The playwright died peacefully in his sleep, at his home in Montauk on the eastern end of the East End of Long Island. Albee spent many years teaching playwriting at the University of Houston.

While a prolific playwright, Albee was arguably best known for his searing play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" the film adaptation of which became a classic movie starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

After years of toiling as a writer in obscurity, Albee was thrust as an "overnight success" with the success of "Virginia Wolff" in 1962. The play's unflinching and unvarnished look at the domestic dysfunction of an alcohol-fueled couple, George and Martha, shocked and enthralled audiences unaccustomed to seeing such raw and unfiltered themes on the stage.

The now-classic play would later be rejected for a Pulitzer for its themes of profanity and sexuality that were ahead of their time in the early 60s. But no matter, Albee would go on to win three Pulitzers for "A Delicate Balance," "Seascape" and "Three Tall Women" on his way to cementing his iconic status.

Albee's personal narrative was as compelling as the characters he fleshed out paper. As the New York Post noted, the adopted grandson of legendary vaudeville producer Edward F. Albee, the playwright in youth eschewed his comfortable Westchester upbringing in favor of the bohemian life of a Greenwich Village denizen in the 1950s.

Taking that non-traditional path prompted his parents to disinherit him, as the Post writes in its profile. He would eke out a living delivering Western Union telegrams while honing his writing craft. That Western Union job would provide the needed typewriter -- albeit stolen by the young writer -- to create his first play, "A Zoo Story" detailing the conversational crescendo between two men in Central Park that culminates with violence.

The play portended the sometimes violent, always unpredictable, nature of many of Albee's plays that became something of a signature for the singular dramatist.

“All the short stories and poems and essays I’d written were crap,” the writer Michael Riedel recalled Albee having once told him. “I knew that. ‘The Zoo Story’ was the first thing I wrote that ever had any merit.”

The play premiered in Berlin in 1959, opening off-Broadway in 1960 to positive reviews.

But his quest to match the success and renown of "Virginia Woolf" would prove elusive, with subsequent work not as well reviewed. But by 1991, he was back in form with "Three Tall Women," a dark-humor play about a difficult woman through various stages of life that was patterned after his own mother, Riedel noted.

The New York Post scribe recalled how Albee himself was taken aback by his own second act in the landscape of American letters, pleasantly surprised at his "comeback" in the early 90s.

"I never stopped writing plays," he told Riedel. "People stopped coming to them, but I never stopped writing them. And now they’re coming back. So that’s nice.”

Neil Portnow, president and CEO of The Recording Academy, issued a statement in reaction to Albee's death to convey how the writer redefined the playwriting craft with his themes exploring the human condition in a time of modernity.

"Edward Albee was a playwright who defined the art form for a generation of American writers with works that masterfully examined the modern condition," Portnow said in a prepared statement. "His Broadway debut, 'Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf,' won him a GRAMMY®, a Tony, and the hearts of audiences around the world. His commitment to the arts and artistic community was unrivaled. He will be sorely missed. Our deepest condolences go out to his family, friends, students, and literary colleagues."

>>> Photo of Edward Albee in the public domain via WikiMedia Commons