 Playwright Edward Albee, Who Changed And Challenged Audiences, Dies At 88 
 
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 Edward Albee, the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? among many others, died Friday at the age of 88 following a short illness, according to his longtime personal assistant. Indeed, Albee said it was his mission. 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. a character asks in Albee's 1996 "The Play About the Baby." "Have that experience — and I think 'what the play is about' will reveal itself quite readily." As he wrote in a 2007 letter to the audience of Me, Myself and I, that question made him "become uncooperative — and occasionally downright hostile." Ben Brantley, chief theater critic of The New York Times, thinks Albee was one of the great American dramatists. 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?" 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. Clinton also awarded Albee a National Medal of the Arts that year.
– 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."