Noted American playwright
Edward Franklin Albee explored the darker aspects of human relationships in plays like
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
(1962) and
Three Tall Women
(1991), which won his third Pulitzer Prize.
People know Edward Franklin Albee III for works, including
The Zoo Story
,
The Sandbox
and
The American Dream
.
He well crafted his works, considered often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflected a mastery and Americanization of the theater of the absurd, which found its peak in European playwrights, such as
Jean Genet,
Samuel Barclay Beckett, and
Eugène Ionesco. Younger Pulitzer Prize-winner
Paula Vogel credits daring mix of theatricalism and biting dialogue of Albee with helping to reinvent the postwar theater in the early 1960s. Dedication of Albee to continuing to evolve his voice — as evidenced in later productions such as
The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?
(2000) — also routinely marks him as distinct of his era.
Albee described his work as "an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen."
