Albee, Edward

Edward Franklin Albee III is an American playwright born in Washington DC. His parents abandoned him immediately after he was born, and he was later adopted by Reed and Frances Albee, a wealthy couple that ran some seventy vaudeville theatres in New York. Edward Albee spent most of his early life in Manhattan. His schooling was expensive and problematic. He was, for example expelled from Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, and in 1946 he dropped out of a Connecticut military college just before he was about to graduate. He felt happier at Choate School, and he began to write and publish his work, for example the poem "Nihilist" in The Choate Literary Magazine in 1946. He attended Trinity College, Connecticut, without graduating, and two years later he moved to Greenwich Village in New York where he spent ten years doing odd jobs such as errand boy and salesman at the Bloomingdales department store.