Discarded and abandoned by his real parents, he was adopted by Reed and Francis Albee, inheritors of the multi- million dollar fortune of the American Theater. Frances was Reed’s third wife who was twenty three years younger than him. Albee lived an extremely comfortable life. He started writing poetry at six and began attending theatre at the same age. At the age of twelve he wrote a three act sex farce. By the time he was teenager he had written two novels. Many critics believed that the tense family conflicts in his plays are a product from his childhood experiences. He enrolled at Trinity College in Connecticut for a brief time and attended several private and military colleges. Unfortunately he attained limited accomplishment as an author of poetry and fiction before turning towards drama. Though he remained connected with Broadway theatre till the production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?(1962); his primary earning of critical and popular acclaim for his one act dramas, provoked comparisons with Eugene Ionesco and Tennessee Williams. Albee is a winner of three Pullitzer prizes, and numerous other prominent awards, for his dramatic works. Even though initially illustrated either as a realist or an absurdist, Albee merges elements both from the American tradition of social criticism, practiced by playwrights such as Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and …show more content…
The portrayal of such a condition is the main concern of any playwright who belongs to Samuel Beckett’s realm. Hence, criticism of a particular society is not the aim of any Absurdist whereas in a play like The American Dream the audience is already set to watch an American drama; the dramatist attacks a society in its very basic unit, the family. Many critics considered the play as a representative of the Absurd Drama; Nicholas Canaday in Albee’s American Dream and Existential Vacuum labeled , “ The American Dream as America’s best example of what has come to be known as ‘the theatre of the absurd’”(28) Damien Jaques in A Discussion of Modern American Drama: Edward Albee refers to the play as the starting point of the Absurd Theatre in America, he writes saying that, “Don’t let The American Dream as the beginning of the American absurdist theatre movement frighten you.”