Edward Albee is a playwright best known for such award-winning dramas as The Zoo Story, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", Tiny Alice, and Three Tall Women. With his confrontational dramas and decidedly unhappy endings, Albee has never been considered a commercial darling of the stage. As Anne Paolucci explained in From Tension to Tonic: The Plays of Edward Albee, he was "the first playwright in the American theatre to capture the feverish contradictions of [the second half of the twentieth century] . . . , translating communication as commonly understood and accepted into a polarization of opposites, a skeptical questioning of 'facts,' substituting irony for statement and paradox for simplistic optimism. His cutting sarcasm is, understandably, one of his greatest achievements." Albee has won a number of major awards for drama, including three Pulitzer Prizes, two Antoinette Perry, or "Tony," Awards, an Obie Award, and the National Medal of Arts.

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