A Delicate Balance (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Edward Albee was adopted in Washington, D.C., two weeks after his birth on March 12, 1928, by Reed A. Albee (who, after retiring from his father’s theatre business, raised horses) and Frances (Cotter) Albee (who once worked as a live mannequin for the upscale Bergdorf department stores). His adopted grandfather, Edward Franklin Albee, for whom he was named, was part owner of the Keith-Albee Theatre Circuit, a coast-to-coast chain of over two hundred vaudeville theaters. As stated in Richard E. Amacher’s book Edward Albee, upon his adoption, Albee was immediately taken to a “sprawling Tudor stucco house in Westchester [New York]” where he lived out his early years in a “world of servants, tutors, riding lessons.” As a child, Albee spent his time in New York during the summers and in Miami or Palm Beach during the winters. Albee’s mother is quoted as saying (in Amacher’s book) that “there was a Rolls to bring him... to matinees in the city” and that he had at his disposal “a St. Bernard to pull his sleigh in the wintertime.” At the age of twelve, Albee wrote his first play, a three-act sex-farce.

Albee’s education was marked by several dramatic departures from school. He was expelled from Lawrenceville Preparatory School (New Jersey) and Valley Forge Military Academy (Pennsylvania). Later he graduated from the private high school Choate Rosemary Hall (Connecticut) but then was dismissed from Trinity College “in his sophomore year, reportedly for failure to attend Chapel and certain classes,” writes Amacher.

Due to family tensions, especially between Albee and his mother, Albee left home at the age of twenty. It was at this time, with the aid of a family trust from his grandmother, that Albee moved to Greenwich Village and took on a series of odd jobs. It would not be until ten years later, right before Albee turned thirty, that he would write his first hugely successful play The Zoo Story. From there, according to Richard Farr writing in the Progressive, “Albee went on to write a series of chilling attacks on the American domestic verities.” His first full-length play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) is one such play as is A Delicate Balance (1966), which was to become Albee’s first experience in winning the Pulitzer Prize (1967). Albee would eventually capture two more Pulitzer Prizes with his plays Seascape (1975) and Three Tall Women (1994). It should be noted that both Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and A Delicate Balance were made into successful movies, with Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? wining five Academy Awards.

In Albee’s plays, he often wrestles “with the obsessive influence of his adoptive mother,” relates Lawrence DeVine in his review of Mel Gussow’s Edward Albee: A Singular Journey: A Biography. This theme is partly played out in A Delicate Balance but does not seem to have been put to rest until Albee “was nearly 65 years old,” states De Vine. After a tailspin in his theatrical career, which lasted almost twenty-five years, Albee wrote and saw successfully produced his play Three Tall Women (which won him his third Pulitzer). Albee admits that this is a play that describes three different stages of his mother’s life (she was, in fact, six feet two inches tall). With this play, writes De Vine, Albee psychologically “took off his hair shirt,” and professionally achieved renewed success “after enduring a long period of critical neglect and abuse.” He was also successful, at this time in his life, in overcoming a long bout with alcoholism.

In 1996, President Clinton presented Albee with a Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Award, honoring him for his lifetime’s contribution to the nation’s culture. In his article “A Question of Identity,” Robert Brustein quotes Clinton as saying that Albee’s first play, Zoo Story, was “a play that took the American theater by storm and changed it forever.” Clinton then added, “In your rebellion, the American theater was reborn.” Over his professional career, many critics have made similar statements and have hailed Albee as the successor to such acclaimed playwrights as Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O’Neill. Albee is also credited with inspiring a new generation of dramatists and remains one of America’s most celebrated playwrights.