‘Virginia Woolf’ playwright Edward Albee dies at 88

NEW YORK: Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee, whose provocative and often brutal look at American life in works such as “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

NEW YORK: Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee, whose provocative and often brutal look at American life in works such as “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” earned him a reputation as one of the greatest American dramatists, died on Friday in Montauk, New York. He was 88.

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He died in the late afternoon at his summer home in Montauk, a seaside fishing hamlet on the eastern tip of Long Island, after suffering a short illness to which he apparently succumbed, Albee’s assistant, Jakob Holder, told Reuters.

Holder said the playwright was not alone at the time of his death, but declined to furnish any further details.

Albee once told the Paris Review that he decided at age 6 that he was a writer but chose to work in the format of plays after concluding he was not a very good poet or novelist. His works would eventually rank him alongside Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill in American drama. Albee described a playwright as “someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage,” and the innards of his own works included anger as he pushed themes such as alienation, resentment and the dark underside of life in the 1950s.