Edward Albee was born on March 12, 1928. He was adopted as an infant by Reid Albee, the son of Edward Franklin Albee of the powerful Keith-Albee vaudeville chain. He was raised in great affluence and sent to preparatory and military schools. ending his formal education after a year and a half at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Albee often clashed with his mother and eventually left home when he was 20 and moved to New York's Greenwich Village. Albee's first job was writing continuity dialogue for radio station WNYC. After using up the inheritance from his paternal grandmother, he took a variety of menial jobs until 1959 when The Zoo Story made him a famous playwright, first in… Europe, where it premiered in Berlin, and then in New York. In 1960 it won the Vernon Rice Memorial Award. Albee's first and major "hit" was Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which opened on Broadway in 1963. It ran for 664 performances and was made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and is probably Albee's most recognized work. In 1966, A Delicate Balance won Albee his first Pulitzer Prize. In 1975, Albee won his second Pulitzer with Seascape, and then his third with Three Tall Women in 1991. Three Tall Women enjoyed a sold-out success in New York and has been staged across the country and around the world. It received Best Play awards from the New York Drama Critics Circle and Outer Critics Circle. Albee has written 25 plays and over the years has received an impressive number of awards including two Tony Awards, one for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1965 and a Lifetime Achievement Tony Award in 2005. Albee also taught at the School of Theatre of the University of Houston and gives lectures on his work at colleges around the US.
Carson McCullers was born in Columbus, Georgia, on February 19, 1917. She died at age fifty in Nyack, New York, on September 29, 1967. A promising pianist, she had hoped to enroll at the Juilliard School of Music when she was seventeen, but when she arrived in New York, she attended writing classes at Columbia University instead. In December 1936 her first story, "Wunderkind," was published in "Story" magazine. That winter she began work on "The Mute," which would become her enduring masterpiece, "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter."