1. Edward Albee By Kayla Sanford

2. Back in the day

3. About him • Edward Albee was born Edward Harvey in Washington dc • At the age of two weeks, he was adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Reed Albee of Larchmont, New York • renamed Edward Franklin Albee III • Edward Albee knew that he was adopted, but he has never attempted to locate his birth parents.

4. Edward Albee was exposed to the theater at an early age • developed a passionate love for the arts • his adoptive parents expected him to pursue a more conventional business or professional career • he found himself at odds with his adoptive family over their expectations for him and his own artistic ambitions.

5. He was expelled from two private schools before graduating from Choate, • dropped out of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut midway through his sophomore year. • At 20, he broke with his family and moved to Greenwich Village. He never saw his father again, and would not see his mother for 17 years.

6. the next decade, Albee lived off of a small inheritance from his grandmother, • Enthralled with the artistic ferment of Manhattan in the 1950s, he absorbed every innovation in art, music, literature and the theater • he finally found his calling in writing for the theater.

7. At age 30, he completed his first major work, The Zoo Story. The play received its world premiere in Berlin, Germany in 1959, and opened Off-Broadway the following year. • The Sandbox • The American Dream • The Death of Bessie Smith

8. His first Broadway production, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, was a runaway success and a critical sensation. The play received a Tony Award • Albee was enshrined in the pantheon of American dramatists alongside Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.

9. Albee's adoptive father, Reed Albee, died before the success of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, • in 1965, Edward Albee attempted a reconciliation with his adoptive mother, Frances • Albee worked hard at the relationship until his mother's death in 1989.

10. With the profits from Virginia Woolf, Albee created the Edward F. Albee Foundation in 1967. • The foundation sponsors a summer artists' colony in Montauk, Long Island, where the playwright makes his summer home. • The Pulitzer Committee finally honored Albee in 1967 for his metaphysical drawing room drama A Delicate Balance.

11. In the 1970s, he was drinking heavily and had fallen far behind in his taxes and later quit drinking • from 1989 to 2003 taught playwriting at the University of Houston • comeback with Three Tall Women in 1994. • In 1996, Albee was one of the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors and was awarded the National Medal of Arts

12. the American Theater Wing presented Edward Albee with a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement, recognizing him as America's greatest living playwright • Me Myself and I opened at New York's Playwrights Horizon in 2010. Admiring reviews and enthusiastic audiences confirmed that in his ninth decade, Albee's work has lost none of its power.

13. What he looks like today