Edward Franklin Albee III received his name from Reed and Frances Albee, the couple to whom his natural birth parents gave him up for adoption. He had been born two weeks earlier, on March 12, 1928. A trust fund left to him by his foster grandmother enabled him to pursue a career as a writer, mainly as a poet. He lived in Greenwich Village and supplemented the income from the trust fund with lowpaying work. When he was thirty, he quit his job delivering telegrams, and the soon-to-be-famous dramatist wrote his first play, The Zoo Story.
Prosperity and mass consumerism. The 1950s were a period of prosperity for many Americans, a time when a record number of consumers had access to an abundance of material goods. Catch phrases such as "standard of living" and "cost of living" came into vogue, implying that life could be measured in terms of income and acquisitions.
Additionally, the nation was pervaded by the sense that it had come into its own. Americans had weathered the Great Depression of the 1930s; they had endured scarcity because of the war effort in the 1940s; and the horrors of the war-especially the Holocaust and the effects of the atomic bomb-had begun to fade from memory in most Americans not directly affected by the war.
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