Brief Biography

Born:  March 12, 1928

“Edward Albee Interview.”  Interview by Mike Wood.  Camera by Greg Matthias.  Edit by Steve Worley.  February 26, 1991.  Houston, Texas.  Site hosted by The William Inge Center for the Arts.  Video hosted by Wichita State University.  

Edward Albee, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, was born March 12, 1928 in Virginia. He began writing plays 30 years later. In 1958, Albee wrote The Zoo Story in three weeks. It premiered on September 28, 1959 in Berlin and four months later played on a double bill with Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Late Tape at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village. It won the Vernon Rice Memorial Award in 1960. Also produced in 1960-61 was Fam and Yam, The Death of Bessie Smith, The Sandbox and The American Dream. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened on Broadway in October, 1962, and ran for 644 performances. It received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as well as two Tony Awards. In 1966, Warner Brothers released the film of the play which starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Albee’s next play was an adaptation of Carson McCuller’s The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1963). He also adapted Malcolm (1965) from a novel by James Purdy, Everything in the Garden (1967) from a play by Giles Cooper, and Lolita (1979) adapted from the novel by Vladimir Nabokov. Other Albee works include Tiny Alice (1964), A Delicate Balance (1966), Box and Quotations From Mao Tse-Tung (1968), All Over (1971), Seascape (1974), Listening (1975), Counting the Ways (1976), The Lady From Dubuque (1979), The Man Who Had Three Arms (1981), Finding the Sun (1982), and Marriage Play (1987). Albee won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for A Delicate Balance and also in 1975 for Seascape. He is a member of the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, chairman of the Awards Commission of Brandeis University, president of the Edward Albee Foundation and has been a member for the Council of the Dramatists Guild for 24 years.