Biography - Edward Albee
Albee was born on March 12, 1928, in Washington, D. C., and adopted at the age of two weeks
by Reed and Frances Albee, who named him Edward after Reed’s father. This elder Edward held
a substantial business interest in a chain of vaudeville theatres, and the family was very wealthy.
Young Edward’s early years were spent among servants, nurses, tutors, as the family alternated
between stays in the mansion in Larchmont, New York, and extended winter holidays in Florida.
He had, it seems, few friends his own age, but he did own a variety of pets – cats, guinea pigs, a
St. Bernard.
His parents were, in several ways, a unique couple. His father, Reed, was a small, quiet,
apparently unassertive man. Frances Albee, on the other hand, seems to have been loud,
aggressive, domineering. She was also twenty-three years younger and a foot taller than her
husband. Other of Albee’s biographers usually stress her love of riding and suggest that her usual
daytime wear was jodhpurs and a riding crop. Young Edward, who disliked riding, apparently felt
more at home with his grandmother (Mrs. Albee’s mother).
Albee’s school record was, in the conventional sense, a very bad one. Sent to a boarding school at
the age of eleven, he was eventually dismissed from it for cutting classes, ignoring his academic
work, not playing compulsory sports, and general bad behaviour. To encourage him toward
greater self-discipline, his mother sent him to the Valley Forge Military Academy. Albee’s
conduct, however, was apparently a problem that the resources of the academy were not designed
to cope with, and he left that school too, at the school’s request. His next school was Choate,
where, it seems, the atmosphere was more congenial to him. For one thing, the school did not
practice repressive discipline; for another, his teachers were ready to encourage him to write.
Albee had written stories and poetry even before first going to boarding school, but now his
output increased. He wrote enthusiastically, sometimes for as many as eighteen hours a day,
completing during his time at Choate many stories and a full-length novel. One of his poems was
published in a Texas ”little magazine,” Kaleidoscope, and others appeared in the Choate Literary
Magazine, as did his play Schism.
Graduated from Choate in 1946, Albee entered Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, but did
not remain there long. He also spent some months, at various times, at Columbia and Washington
Universities.
Between leaving Choate and his final departure from his family, Albee seems to have lived the
life of a country socialite. At one point during this period he was engaged (he is still a bachelor).
Also while still at home, he took his first job, at the age of nineteen, writing continuity for a radio
station. But life with his family, according to all accounts, had become a running battle over
minor incidents, and in 1948 he left, for good, for New York City. At first, at least, his
independence was bolstered by a $250-a-month allowance from his paternal grandmother’s
estate.
1
Within a year he had moved in with the composer William Flanagan, and he and
Flanagan shared apartments for the next several years. Through Flanagan, Albee was able to
move among musical and literary circles. (At one time W. H. Auden suggested he write
pornography to correct his style; at another, Thornton Wilder read his poetry and suggested he
write plays.)
During the years between leaving home and becoming a professional playwright, Albee held a
succession of jobs: waiter, bartender, office boy, salesman in Gimbel’s department store and in
1
As yet, there is no definitive biography of Albee, and various accounts of his life differ, sometimes substantially. Of
those listed in the bibliography, Amacher and Bigsby say that the allowance continued uninterrupted. Gould states
that it ended after about a year.
