FILE - In this March 13, 2008, file photo, Edward Albee poses for a portrait in New York. The three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright has died in suburban New York City at age 88. Albee assistant... (Associated Press) 
 
 NEW YORK (AP) — Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee, who challenged theatrical convention in masterworks such as "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and "A Delicate Balance," died Friday, his personal assistant said. He was 88. 
 
 He died at his home in Montauk, east of New York, assistant Jackob Holder said. No cause of death was immediately given, although he had suffered from diabetes. With the deaths of Arthur Miller and August Wilson in 2005, he was arguably America's greatest living playwright. 
 
 Several years ago, before undergoing extensive surgery, Albee penned a note to be issued at the time of his death: "To all of you who have made my being alive so wonderful, so exciting and so full, my thanks and all my love." 
 
 Albee was proclaimed the playwright of his generation after his blistering "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" opened on Broadway in 1962. The Tony-winning play, still widely considered Albee's finest, was made into an award-winning 1966 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. 
 
 The play's sharp-tongued humor and dark themes were the hallmarks of Albee's style. In more than 30 plays, Albee skewered such mainstays of American culture as marriage, child-rearing, religion and upper-class comforts. 
 
 "If you have no wounds, how can you know you're alive?" a character asks in Albee's 1996 "The Play About the Baby." 
 
 "It's just a quirk of the brain that makes one a playwright," Albee said in 2008. "I have the same experiences that everybody else does, but... I feel the need to translate a lot of what happens to me, a lot of what I think, into a play." 
 
 Albee challenged audiences to question their assumptions about society and about theater itself. He did it with humor and a sense of linguistic delight, using withering barbs and word play to hint at deeper meaning. 
 
 Praise for the playwright came from far and wide on Twitter after his death. Mia Farrow, who was in a staged reading of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" called Albee "one of the great" playwrights "of our time." Michael McKean wrote: "There was only one Edward Albee. #Irreplaceable." Playwright Lynn Nottage wrote: "I will miss his wit, irreverence & wisdom. He enlivened the theatre landscape." 
 
 Albee's unconventional style won him great acclaim but also led to a nearly 20-year drought of critical and commercial recognition before his 1994 play, "Three Tall Women," garnered his third Pulitzer Prize. His other Pulitzers were for "A Delicate Balance" (1967) and "Seascape" (1975). 
 
 Many of his productions in the years after "Seascape" were savaged by the press as inconsequential trickery, a shadow of his former works. But after "Three Tall Women," a play he called an "exorcising of demons," he had several major productions, including "The Play About the Baby" and "The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?" which won him his second Tony for best play in 2002. 
 
 Many of his works had similar things in common: domestic rancor inflamed by booze, a sense of unknown anxiety, a lost child who creates a marital friction and precise but flailing language that alternates between comic and profound. 
 
 In interviews, Albee recoiled at the idea of drawing parallels between his works or between his cynical outlook and his unhappy childhood. 
 
 "Each play of mine has a distinctive story to tell," he told The Santa Fe New Mexican in 2001. 
 
 Albee was born in 1928 and was adopted by a wealthy suburban New York couple. His father, Reed Albee, ran the Keith-Albee chain of vaudeville theaters; his mother, Frances Albee, was a socialite and a commanding presence who kept a hold on him for much of his life. 
 
 Estranged from his parents, Albee moved to New York and worked as a messenger for Western Union before gaining notice with "The Zoo Story," a one-act play written in 1958 about two strangers meeting on a bench in Central Park. 
 
 With "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and 1964's "Tiny Alice," Albee shook up a Broadway that had been dominated by Tennessee Williams, Miller and their intellectual disciples. 
 
 "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" presents an all-night drinking bout in which a middle-age professor and his wife verbally spar and unravel their illusions during a visit by a younger couple. It won five Tonys including best play, actor (Arthur Hill) and actress (Uta Hagen), and the film version won five Oscars including best actress (Taylor) and supporting actress (Sandy Dennis). 
 
 Albee also directed the American premieres of many of his plays, starting with "Seascape" in 1975. "Seascape" and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" were revived on Broadway in 2005, and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" was revived on Broadway again in 2013. "A Delicate Balance" was revived a year later, starring Glenn Close. 
 
 Albee brought back "The Zoo Story" to startling effect in 2007 with "Edward Albee's Peter and Jerry." The shattering encounter between two strangers in a park that is "The Zoo Story" became the second act of the new work. The first act was based on Albee's much later "Homelife." 
 
 It was one of a number of fruitful productions around the time Albee turned 80 in 2008. 
 
 That year saw the world premiere of his play about identical twins, "Me, Myself and I," in Princeton, New Jersey; a New York revival of two of his early one-act classics, "The American Dream" and "The Sandbox"; and the premiere of "Edward Albee's Occupant," about sculptor Louise Nevelson and the cult of celebrity. 
 
 Albee was honored by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 1996 for his lifetime contributions. Then-President Bill Clinton praised Albee as a man who inspired a generation of American dramatists. Clinton also awarded Albee a National Medal of the Arts that year. 
 
 Into his 70s, Albee continued to write provocative and unconventional plays. In "The Goat or Who is Sylvia?" the main character falls in love with a goat. 
 
 Albee's longtime companion, sculptor Jonathan Thomas, died in 2005. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits ||||| Now at stake, at a minimum, are the latest drafts of Albee’s final known project, “Laying an Egg,” about a middle-aged woman struggling to become pregnant. (One plot element concerned her father’s will.) The play was twice scheduled for production at Signature Theater, an Off Broadway nonprofit in New York, and twice withdrawn by Albee, who said it wasn’t ready. 
 
 Even if the executors destroy Albee’s draft, other copies may exist — a Broadway producer, Elizabeth Ireland McCann, said she had at least a partial version of the script — but it is not clear whether Albee had done work on the project that only he had seen. It is also unclear whether Albee left any other incomplete manuscripts behind, or whether the language in the will could be interpreted to apply to early drafts of his published plays. 
 
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 “Am I disappointed? Yes, because every tiny bit of everything that a writer has written provides insight into that writer’s creative process,” said David A. Crespy, president of the Edward Albee Society and a professor of playwriting at the University of Missouri. “But am I surprised? No. He maintained very strict control over the materials that were available to the public.” 
 
 Albee is best known for “Virginia Woolf,” a penetrating 1962 drama that was adapted into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. He won the Pulitzer Prize three times — in 1967 for “A Delicate Balance,” in 1975 for “Seascape” and in 1994 for “Three Tall Women” — and the Tony Award twice, in 1963 for “ Virginia Woolf” and in 2002 for “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” He also won a Tony Award for lifetime achievement in 2005. 
 
 His work is frequently staged; a revival of “Three Tall Women,” starring Glenda Jackson and Laurie Metcalf, is to open on Broadway next year. 
 
 The playwright died in September at the age of 88. His will, which he signed in 2012, was filed in Suffolk County Surrogate’s Court; the provision in question says, in part: “If at the time of my death I shall leave any incomplete manuscripts I hereby direct my executors to destroy such incomplete manuscripts.” 
 
 Until the manuscripts are destroyed, the will says, the executors should “treat the materials herein directed to be destroyed as strictly confidential and to ensure that such materials are not copied, made available for scholarly or critical review or made public in any way.” 
 
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 There is one potentially complicating provision, declaring that it is up to the executors to determine what material counts as incomplete, and is thus covered by the destruction instruction. 
 
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 Sam Rudy, Albee’s longtime spokesman, said the executors would have no comment on the instruction or their handling of the estate. 
 
 Several artists interviewed backed Albee’s right to decide the posthumous disposition of his writings. 
 
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 “For writers, drafts of unfinished work can be quite sensitive,” said Doug Wright, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (“I Am My Own Wife”) who is president of the Dramatists Guild of America. “These drafts are not public property; they belong to the author, and the author has the right to determine their fate.” 
 
 And James Bundy, dean of the Yale School of Drama, said “Edward’s choice strikes me as entirely in keeping with his own exacting standards.” 
 
 “It’s no more our business than it would have been if he had made a little bonfire of his work before his death, or shredded some manuscripts one day long ago — perhaps he did,” Mr. Bundy said. “It’s ultimately a good thing for artists to negotiate their own artistic destinies within the framework of the relevant laws: They have no more, and no fewer, rights than would you and I in the same situation.” 
 
 But lawyers who study the intersection of estate law and intellectual property say the issue is actually murkier. There is a long history of heirs substituting their own judgments for those of deceased artists, and little case law about whether that is O.K. Among the most famous examples: Kafka asked his friend to burn his diaries and manuscripts, but the friend instead allowed publication of the writer’s unpublished novels; Eugene O’Neill did not want “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” published or performed until 25 years after his death, but his widow allowed it within three years; Adam Yauch, one of the Beastie Boys, included a provision in his will barring the use of his music in advertising, but the provision’s validity was quickly questioned. 
 
 “It presents a moral and legal quandary,” said John Sare, a partner at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler and the co-author of “Estate Planning for Authors and Artists.” “You may feel a moral obligation to do as you’ve been asked, but that may be in competition with a moral obligation to do what’s best for the history of arts and letters and a legal obligation to conserve the assets of the estate for the beneficiaries.” 
 
 Eva E. Subotnik, an associate professor at St. John’s University School of Law, argued for some skepticism about such provisions. 
 
 “There is something special about these kinds of assets — they’re not just like a mansion or a fancy watch, but they’re socially valuable, and that has to play into the calculus,” Ms. Subotnik said. “I definitely argue against full-throttle enforcement of artistic control after death.” 
 
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 But another expert on the subject, Lior J. Strahilevitz, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, disagreed. “Part of what we value in a great artist is not just raw ability but the ability to curate, and it’s frequently the case that artists build great reputations by being selective about what they show to the world,” he said. “It’s problematic to force Albee to share these plays when he didn’t think they were good enough.”
– Edward Albee can no longer be considered America's greatest living playwright. The 88-year-old, whose most famous works include A Delicate Balance and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, died Friday at his home in Montauk, New York. Albee, a three-time Pulitzer winner, was famous for challenging audiences with his works, starting with 1960's The Zoo Story. "All art should be useful," he once told NPR. "If it's merely decorative, it's a waste of time. You know, if you're going to spend a couple of hours of your life listening to string quartets or being at plays or going to a museum and looking at paintings, something should happen to you. You should be changed." Albee was put up for adoption within weeks of his birth in Virginia in 1928 and ended up with the owners of a chain of vaudeville theaters, the New York Times notes. "They didn’t want a writer on their hands. Good God, no," recalled Albee, whose path to becoming a playwright included expulsion from Hartford's Trinity College, moving to Greenwich Village during its heyday as a creative hub, and what he described as failure in all other branches of writing. Albee's partner of 35 years, sculptor Jonathan Thomas, died in 2005. The AP reports that before surgery several years ago, Albee wrote this statement, to be issued on his death: "To all of you who have made my being alive so wonderful, so exciting and so full, my thanks and all my love."