Albee has won three Pulitzer Prizes in three different decades, as well as many other awards, and his drama is the subject of many book-length studies and hundreds of articles published in scholarly journals. He is the most intellectual of the major American playwrights, and his dialogue is the most articulate and witty. His first full-length play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (1962), has been so critically and commercially successful that even people who do not go to the theater know of it. It also continues to be widely taught in high-school and college English and theater courses. Beginning with The Zoo Story (1959), Albee's plays have been translated, produced, and published abroad as often as at home. Early in his career he was labeled as part of the theater of the absurd, the postwar European movement that includes such dramatists as Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, and Harold Pinter; however, this classification is inaccurate. Although Albee's dramaturgy and theatrical style in certain plays have resembled Ionesco's and Beckett's, the worldview expressed in his plays is never as fatalistic and nihilistic as theirs. Rather, he espouses an existentialist vision from which he criticizes individuals and American society as a whole with biting satire.
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