Albee's writing is often compared to Eugene O'Neill's. In Long Day's Journey into Night (1956), O'Neill tells a story about an unhappy, dysfunctional family in which the youngest son is sent to a sanatorium to recover from tuberculosis, all the while despising his father for sending him there. The young man's mother is wrecked by narcotics, and his older brother is an alcoholic.

When Albee's writing leans more toward the absurd, it is often compared to Harold Pinter's. One of Pinter's more famous plays is The Homecoming (1976), which is set in an old house in North London, where an aging father lives with his two sons and his younger brother. The action begins when Teddy, another one of the father's sons, who has been away from the family for six years, brings his wife home to visit the family she has...