Edward Albee

Harman Writer-In-Residence, Fall 2000

Edward Albee, the distinguished playwright, is the Fall 2000 Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College. The author of 25 plays and the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including Kennedy Center Honors and a National Medal of Arts, Albee received the Pulitzer Prize for “A Delicate Balance, Seascape, and Three Tall Women”; a Tony Award for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”; and the Vernon Rice Award for “The Zoo Story.” His other plays include “The Death of Bessie Smith,” “The Sandbox,” “Fam and Yam,” “The American Dream,” “The Ballad of the Sad Cafe” (adapted from the novella by Carson McCullers), “Tiny Alice,” “Malcolm” (adapted from the novel by James Purdy), “Everything in the Garden” (adapted from the play by Giles Cooper), “Box and Quotations from Mao Tse-Tung,” “All Over,” “Listening,” “Counting the Ways,” The Lady from Dubuque,” “Lolita” (adapted from the novel by Vladimir Nabokov), “The Man Who Had Three Arms,” “Finding the Sun,” “Marriage Play,” “The Lorca Play, Fragments,” and “The Play About the Baby.”

A member of the Dramatists Guild Council and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Albee is the president of the Edward F. Albee Foundation, Inc. He teaches a course in playwriting each spring at the University of Houston and will be teaching a class in reviewing and criticism for the theater at Baruch. (July 1999)

Biographical Update

Edward Albee received a Tony Award, a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play and a Pulitzer Prize nomination for “The Goat or Who is Sylvia?” in 2002. In 2005, he accepted a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. The Broadway revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” was one of the hits of the season, and received a 2005 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play nomination. He has also received the Edward MacDowell Medal for Lifetime Achievement (2011), the Pioneer Award for Lifetime Achievement (2011) and the America Award in Literature (2015).

Albee’s work includes the book “Stretching My Mind: Essays 1960-2005,” and the plays “Occupant” (2001); “Knock! Knock! Who’s There!?” (2003); “Peter & Jerry” (2004), retitled in 2009 as “At Home at the Zoo” (Act One: Homelife. Act Two: The Zoo Story); and “Me, Myself and I” (2007). 

Edward Albee died on Sept. 16, 2016. Although he was invited to teach a workshop in playwriting, he decided to teach a class in Reviewing and Criticism to 18 talented Baruch undergraduates. He told former Harman Director Professor Roslyn Bernstein, “It’s my chance to get back at the critics.”