SOURCE: "Edward Albee," in Confrontation and Commitment: A Study of Contemporary American Drama, 1959-66, University of Missouri Press, 1967, pp. 71-92.

In the essay below, Bigsby examines Albee's "insistence on the need to abandon a faith in illusion. "

American drama in the early sixties has been effectively dominated by one man. In three years Edward Albee took the American theatre by storm. His first play, The Zoo Story (1959) was greeted by The Villager as, 'The finest play, written by an American, that can be seen for love or money' while Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? received the New York Drama Critics Circle award for the season 1962-3. Indeed this, his first full-length play, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize by that Committee's drama jury. The nomination was, however, rejected because, in the words of W. D. Maxwell, a member of the advisory board, 'I thought it was a filthy...