American playwright Edward Albee, the author of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, has died at his home in Montauk. He was 88. No cause of death was mentioned. Reportedly, he had been suffering from diabetes.
A three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he was one of America’s greatest living playwrights. Albee was awarded Pulitzers for A Delicate Balance, Seascape and Three Tall Women. However, his best-known work was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that chronicled a deteriorating marriage set over the course of one evening. It was denied the 1963 Pulitzer Prize as the prize’s advisory board stated that the work was ‘not sufficiently “uplifting” because of its profanity and sexual themes’. The book, nevertheless, did win a Tony Award for best play, and was later adapted for a film of the same name starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
“I find Virginia Woolf hung about my neck like a shining medal of some sort – really nice but a trifle onerous.” he had said in 1996, when he was awarded a National Medal of the Arts by then-president Bill Clinton.
The play’s cheeky humour and dark themes were the stamps of Albee’s style. His plays dealt with themes of American culture, marriage, child-rearing, religion and upper-class comforts. Many of his works had similar things in common: domestic resentment provoked by alcoholism, a sense of unknown anxiety and marital friction.
Recommended
Albee continued his work even in his 70s, and 2008 saw the premiere of his new play, Me, Myself and I, which was about identical twins. A few years ago, before undergoing major surgery, Albee wrote a short statement to be published at the time of his death: “To all of you who have made my being alive so wonderful, so exciting and so full, my thanks and all my love,” he wrote.
Feature image courtesy : edition.cnn.com