Edward Albee

Edward Albee, widely considered the foremost American playwright of his generation, whose psychologically astute and piercing dramas explored the contentiousness of intimacy, the gap between self-delusion and truth and the roiling desperation beneath the facade of contemporary life, died Friday September 16 2016 at his home in Montauk, N.Y. He was 88. In 1962, Mr. Albee’s Broadway debut, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” the famously scabrous portrait of a withered marriage, won a Tony Award for best play, ran for more than a year and half and enthralled and shocked theatergoers with its depiction of stifling academia and of a couple whose relationship has been corroded by dashed hopes, wounding recriminations and drink. Mr. Albee was born somewhere in Virginia on March 12, 1928. Little is known about his father. His mother’s name was Louise Harvey; she called him Edward. Sent to an adoption nursery in Manhattan before he was three weeks old, baby Edward was placed with Reed Albee, an heir to the Keith-Albee chain of vaudeville theaters, and his wife, Frances, who lived in Larchmont, N.Y. The couple had no children and formally adopted Edward 10 months later, naming him Edward Franklin Albee III after two of his adoptive father’s ancestors. He attended Rye Country Day School in Westchester County, N.Y., the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, the Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania and finally the Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Connecticut, from which he graduated. He attended Trinity College in Hartford but never finished, reportedly because he refused to go to chapel and was expelled. Then, in 1949, he moved to Greenwich Village, where his artistic life began in earnest. His partner of 35 years, Jonathan Thomas, a sculptor, died in 2005. Mr. Albee leaves no immediate survivors.