Albee also hated Larchmont

WRITER'S ALMANAC

It's the birthday of playwright Edward Albee, born Edward Harvey in Washington, D.C. (1928). He was adopted at two weeks old by Mr. and Mrs. Reed Albee of Larchmont, New York, and that is where he grew up. He was exposed to theater from a young age because it was the family business: not as performers, but as part owners of a national chain, the Keith-Albee Organization. His family expected their son to enter a business career, rather than an artistic one, but young Albee had other ideas. He had a falling out with his parents when he was 20 and moved to Greenwich Village; he never spoke to his father again, and he didn't speak to his mother for 17 years.

After dabbling for some years in fiction and poetry, he completed his first play, The Zoo Story (1958), when he was 30. He's best known for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), which was his first Broadway play and a runaway hit.