Edward Albee, numbered among the United States's most acclaimed and controversial playwrights, was born March 12, 1928. As the adopted son of Reed and Frances Albee, heirs to the fortune of American theater manager Edward Franklin Albee, he had an early introduction to the theatre. He began attending performances at the age of six and wrote a three-act sex farce when he was twelve. Albee attended several private and military schools and enrolled briefly at Connecticut's Trinity College from 1946-47. He held a variety of jobs over the next decade, working as a writer for WNYC-radio, an office boy for an advertising agency, a record salesman, and a messenger for Western Union. He wrote both fiction and poetry as a young man, achieving some limited success, and at the age of thirty returned to writing plays, making an impact with his one-act The Zoo Story (1959). Over the next...