Edward Albee, one of the most heralded playwrights of the 20th century and winner of three Pulitzer Prizes for drama, has had his work produced for the stage in six consecutive decades. Through some 25 plays, his singular voice has addressed difficult subjects that have both perplexed and fascinated viewers. His works, featuring savage dialogue punctuated by imaginative comedy, have become required study for aspiring playwrights and actors alike.

Edward Albee

None of it might have come to pass, however, if Albee had not experienced a literary awakening as his 30th birthday approached. It was 1958 and, feeling he still had not written anything of substance, Albee set about testing himself. Sitting down daily to a typewriter in his apartment on Fourth Street in Greenwich Village, he took two and a half weeks to write his first play. It was finished on March 10, two days before his birthday and self-imposed deadline.

Since the day that play, his one-act The Zoo Story, first debuted at the Provincetown Playhouse in January 1960, Albee's critics have billed him as a leading dramatist and successor to American playwrights Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill. Others have noted the influence of European playwrights like Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, demonstrated in his ability to make a direct connection with the disaffected and disenfranchised. Albee has named Ring Lardner, James Thurber, and Jean Genet as important influences on his writing as well. His work has been called unique, uncompromising, controversial, elliptical, and provocative.

Admittedly, Albee dislikes any generalized labels. When told in 1962 that he was considered a member in good standing of the Theater of the Absurd after the success of The Zoo Story, Albee was mortified. He assumed the speaker was referring to mainstream Broadway, where he perceived profitability as outweighing artistic merit. Despite his reservations of expanding his audience base to encompass Broadway, Albee almost single-handedly succeeded in putting absurdist theater on the cultural map. Not content to stop there, his adept fusion of a wide variety of theatrical styles and subjects foretold the direction in which American drama was moving.

He is perhaps best known for his first three-act play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, a brutal portrait of a hard-drinking academic couple. The play received the Tony Award and New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1962. A film adaptation starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton soon followed and was a commercial success. Though praised by Broadway audiences and many critics, some were shocked by the play and deemed it too controversial and unconventional. As a result of an argument concerning its nomination for a Pulitzer Prize, the nominating panel decided not to honor any play that year.

Albee would be vindicated four years later when his play A Delicate Balance won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966. His reign as one of the top New York playwrights continued when he won his second Pulitzer in 1975 for the experimental play Seascape. His third Pulitzer came in 1993 for the autobiographical Three Tall Women, putting him in the rarefied company of three-time winner Robert E. Sherwood, and Eugene O'Neill, who still leads with four. More recently, Albee's 1998 The Play About the Baby enjoyed a successful Off-Broadway run.

Born in Washington, D.C. in 1928, the future playwright was adopted as an infant by Reed and Frances Albee of Larchmont, N.Y. Albee's adoptive father owned a nationwide chain of vaudeville theaters, which meant that young Albee got much early exposure to theater personalities. In 1946, he enrolled in the drama department at Trinity College, a small liberal arts institution in Hartford, Conn. Although his stay there lasted only one year, he gained valuable theatrical experience by performing in the college's productions.

Albee's legacy is not only in his plays, but also in the knowledge he has imparted to aspiring playwrights. He is a frequent lecturer at colleges, having taught theater at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., and the University of California at Irvine. In 1988, Albee was named distinguished professor of drama at the University of Houston, a post he has maintained for the past 14 years. He is president of the Edward F. Albee Foundation, which maintains the William Flanagan Memorial Creative Persons Center—better known as "The Barn"—in Montauk on Long Island as a residence for writers, painters, sculptors, and composers. Longtime staff and faculty members of Juilliard may remember when Albee served as co-director of the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center.

Albee's most recent play, The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? arrived on Broadway in March this year, with the Tony Award-winner Mercedes Ruehl and film star Bill Pullman heading the cast. The play (which is still running) also features Juilliard alumnus Jeffrey Carlson (B.F.A. '01) as the couple's son. Once again, Albee succeeded at squeezing humor from an admittedly dark subject, expertly straddling humor and tragedy. At the age of 74, Albee continues to prove that there are always new audiences to be reached, and boundaries yet to be pushed.

In recognition of Edward Albee's extraordinary contributions to American theater, The Juilliard School will award the playwright an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts on May 24.

—JOSHUA JACOBSON