Edward
Albee : A Singular Journey : A Biography by
Mel
Gussow
With his off-Broadway success The
Zoo Story in 1960 and the Broadway smash Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? in 1962, Edward Albee announced himself as his
generation's great American playwright. He had an unhappy
childhood as the adopted son of wealthy suburbanites with no
interest in his feelings or talents, and later immersed himself in
the flourishing (but still closeted) New York gay scene of the
1950s. These seminal experiences gave Albee a sardonic,
essentially bleak view of human relations that suited the
questioning spirit of the '60s, as did his plays' absurdist tone
and often experimental techniques. Alcoholism and bad reviews
plagued him through much of the 1970s and '80s, but he emerged
triumphant and sober in 1994 with the play Three Tall Women,
which marked his mature understanding of his mother's life and won
him a third Pulitzer Prize. Mel Gussow observed much of this
personal and professional journey as a theater critic and an
acquaintance; his book is a traditional biography based on
research and interviews--with colleagues and friends as well as
Albee himself--that also judiciously uses the author's firsthand
experiences. (A section about the playwright's drunken rudeness at
a dinner party and subsequent apologetic letter to Gussow is
particularly revealing.) Gussow limns his subject's life with
candor, but without prurience, and lucidly conveys Albee's
importance in the American theater. --Wendy Smith
