in Hartford, Connecticut. He stated, “I discovered that the required courses were not the ones I required.” Edward decided to cut the classes that he found boring and audit the ones he liked. Sophomore year was the last of his formal education. He says it wasn’t a big deal because he figured out a way to educate himself and keep on doing it. Albee did mention however that even though his stay at Trinity was brief, he did gain some dramatic experience playing the role of characters in his performances there. Albee describes his work as “an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen.” It was after quitting his job as a messenger that Albee decided to write The Zoo Story (1959), a play about a middle-class man in the publishing business hounded into killing an alienated man who happened to confront him in Central Park. Having been rejected in New York, the play was an instant success in West Germany and soon thereafter gained fame in the US once it returned. It was this play Edward says that changed his life, which played off-Broadway for three and a half years. Albee has shown a fascination for a wide variety of theatrical styles and subjects. A Delicate Balance, which was about a family unable to communicate, won him his first Pulitzer Price along with Best Play awards from the New York Drama Critics and Outer Critics Circle. He gave birth to American absurdist drama with The Sandbox (1959) and The American Dream (1960). In 1975, Albee won his second Pulitzer Prize with Seascape, which combined theatrical experiment and social commentary in a story about a retired vacationing couple who meet a pair of sea lizards at the beach. Albee was hailed as the leader of a new theat...
