FILE - In this March 13, 2008, file photo, Edward Albee poses for a portrait in New York. The three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright has died in suburban New York City at age 88. Albee assistant... (Associated Press) 
 
 NEW YORK (AP) — Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee, who challenged theatrical convention in masterworks such as "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and "A Delicate Balance," died Friday, his personal assistant said. He was 88. 
 
 He died at his home in Montauk, east of New York, assistant Jackob Holder said. No cause of death was immediately given, although he had suffered from diabetes. With the deaths of Arthur Miller and August Wilson in 2005, he was arguably America's greatest living playwright. 
 
 Several years ago, before undergoing extensive surgery, Albee penned a note to be issued at the time of his death: "To all of you who have made my being alive so wonderful, so exciting and so full, my thanks and all my love." 
 
 Albee was proclaimed the playwright of his generation after his blistering "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" opened on Broadway in 1962. The Tony-winning play, still widely considered Albee's finest, was made into an award-winning 1966 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. 
 
 The play's sharp-tongued humor and dark themes were the hallmarks of Albee's style. In more than 30 plays, Albee skewered such mainstays of American culture as marriage, child-rearing, religion and upper-class comforts. 
 
 "If you have no wounds, how can you know you're alive?" a character asks in Albee's 1996 "The Play About the Baby." 
 
 "It's just a quirk of the brain that makes one a playwright," Albee said in 2008. "I have the same experiences that everybody else does, but... I feel the need to translate a lot of what happens to me, a lot of what I think, into a play." 
 
 Albee challenged audiences to question their assumptions about society and about theater itself. He did it with humor and a sense of linguistic delight, using withering barbs and word play to hint at deeper meaning. 
 
 Praise for the playwright came from far and wide on Twitter after his death. Mia Farrow, who was in a staged reading of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" called Albee "one of the great" playwrights "of our time." Michael McKean wrote: "There was only one Edward Albee. #Irreplaceable." Playwright Lynn Nottage wrote: "I will miss his wit, irreverence & wisdom. He enlivened the theatre landscape." 
 
 Albee's unconventional style won him great acclaim but also led to a nearly 20-year drought of critical and commercial recognition before his 1994 play, "Three Tall Women," garnered his third Pulitzer Prize. His other Pulitzers were for "A Delicate Balance" (1967) and "Seascape" (1975). 
 
 Many of his productions in the years after "Seascape" were savaged by the press as inconsequential trickery, a shadow of his former works. But after "Three Tall Women," a play he called an "exorcising of demons," he had several major productions, including "The Play About the Baby" and "The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?" which won him his second Tony for best play in 2002. 
 
 Many of his works had similar things in common: domestic rancor inflamed by booze, a sense of unknown anxiety, a lost child who creates a marital friction and precise but flailing language that alternates between comic and profound. 
 
 In interviews, Albee recoiled at the idea of drawing parallels between his works or between his cynical outlook and his unhappy childhood. 
 
 "Each play of mine has a distinctive story to tell," he told The Santa Fe New Mexican in 2001. 
 
 Albee was born in 1928 and was adopted by a wealthy suburban New York couple. His father, Reed Albee, ran the Keith-Albee chain of vaudeville theaters; his mother, Frances Albee, was a socialite and a commanding presence who kept a hold on him for much of his life. 
 
 Estranged from his parents, Albee moved to New York and worked as a messenger for Western Union before gaining notice with "The Zoo Story," a one-act play written in 1958 about two strangers meeting on a bench in Central Park. 
 
 With "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and 1964's "Tiny Alice," Albee shook up a Broadway that had been dominated by Tennessee Williams, Miller and their intellectual disciples. 
 
 "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" presents an all-night drinking bout in which a middle-age professor and his wife verbally spar and unravel their illusions during a visit by a younger couple. It won five Tonys including best play, actor (Arthur Hill) and actress (Uta Hagen), and the film version won five Oscars including best actress (Taylor) and supporting actress (Sandy Dennis). 
 
 Albee also directed the American premieres of many of his plays, starting with "Seascape" in 1975. "Seascape" and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" were revived on Broadway in 2005, and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" was revived on Broadway again in 2013. "A Delicate Balance" was revived a year later, starring Glenn Close. 
 
 Albee brought back "The Zoo Story" to startling effect in 2007 with "Edward Albee's Peter and Jerry." The shattering encounter between two strangers in a park that is "The Zoo Story" became the second act of the new work. The first act was based on Albee's much later "Homelife." 
 
 It was one of a number of fruitful productions around the time Albee turned 80 in 2008. 
 
 That year saw the world premiere of his play about identical twins, "Me, Myself and I," in Princeton, New Jersey; a New York revival of two of his early one-act classics, "The American Dream" and "The Sandbox"; and the premiere of "Edward Albee's Occupant," about sculptor Louise Nevelson and the cult of celebrity. 
 
 Albee was honored by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 1996 for his lifetime contributions. Then-President Bill Clinton praised Albee as a man who inspired a generation of American dramatists. Clinton also awarded Albee a National Medal of the Arts that year. 
 
 Into his 70s, Albee continued to write provocative and unconventional plays. In "The Goat or Who is Sylvia?" the main character falls in love with a goat. 
 
 Albee's longtime companion, sculptor Jonathan Thomas, died in 2005. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits ||||| Playwright Edward Albee, Who Changed And Challenged Audiences, Dies At 88 
 
 toggle caption Boris Spremo/Toronto Star via Getty Images 
 
 Edward Albee, the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? among many others, died Friday at the age of 88 following a short illness, according to his longtime personal assistant. 
 
 Albee didn't particularly like it when people asked him what his plays were "about." As he wrote in a 2007 letter to the audience of Me, Myself and I, that question made him "become uncooperative — and occasionally downright hostile." Albee acknowledged that his plays could be "occasionally complex" but were "infrequently opaque." The best way to enjoy them, he advised, was without any baggage. "Pretend you're at the first play you've ever seen," he suggested. "Have that experience — and I think 'what the play is about' will reveal itself quite readily." 
 
 Enlarge this image toggle caption Hulton Archive/Getty Images Hulton Archive/Getty Images 
 
 Albee's plays have challenged, engaged and, at times, confounded audiences since he first burst upon the scene in 1960 with The Zoo Story — an unsettling and, ultimately, shocking encounter between two men in Central Park. 
 
 Ben Brantley, chief theater critic of The New York Times, thinks Albee was one of the great American dramatists. "Is there anyone else who dares to take on questions that are that big?" Brantley asks. "I'm not talking about questions of politics or immediate topical issues. Edward Albee asks questions — the most basic existential questions — he confronts death, he confronts sex with, I think, eyes that remain very wide open." 
 
 Despite his protests, when we discussed his plays, Albee let this slip out: 
 
 If anybody wants me to say it, in one sentence, what my plays are about: They're about the nature of identity. Who we are, how we permit ourselves to be viewed, how we permit ourselves to view ourselves, how we practice identity or lack of identity. 
 
 "You know, if anybody wants me to say it, in one sentence, what my plays are about: They're about the nature of identity," he said. "Who we are, how we permit ourselves to be viewed, how we permit ourselves to view ourselves, how we practice identity or lack of identity." 
 
 Albee's questioning of identity came from a deep personal place. He was adopted, as an infant, by Reed and Frances Albee — his father ran a chain of vaudeville theaters — and his relationship with them was chilly. 
 
 "These people who adopted me I didn't like very much and they didn't like me very much, I don't think," Albee said. "We didn't belong in the same family." 
 
 But it did become grist for his mill. The late Marian Seldes starred in several Albee plays — including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Three Tall Women, a play all about Albee's adoptive mother. 
 
 Seldes said that as an actress, she appreciated Albee's precise, grammatically expressive language. 
 
 Enlarge this image toggle caption Jack Mitchell/Getty Images Jack Mitchell/Getty Images 
 
 "I feel it's like a piece of music, a musical score," she said. "I think Edward's punctuation — the ellipses, the number of periods, of dots after a line — if you allow it to go into you, as you would if you were going to sing, you would follow what he suggests." 
 
 Regardless of the style and the language of each play, Brantley says, Albee displayed a rigorous clarity of purpose. 
 
 Brantley says Albee believed that "theater should hold up a mirror to society — but not just a mimetic mirror — not just to show us what we have, but to show us what's beneath, what's to the side; to force us to look at things from another perspective." 
 
 Indeed, Albee said it was his mission. 
 
 "All art should be useful," he said. "If it's merely decorative, it's a waste of time. You know, if you're going to spend a couple of hours of your life listening to string quartets or being at plays or going to a museum and looking at paintings, something should happen to you. You should be changed."
– Edward Albee can no longer be considered America's greatest living playwright. The 88-year-old, whose most famous works include A Delicate Balance and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, died Friday at his home in Montauk, New York. Albee, a three-time Pulitzer winner, was famous for challenging audiences with his works, starting with 1960's The Zoo Story. "All art should be useful," he once told NPR. "If it's merely decorative, it's a waste of time. You know, if you're going to spend a couple of hours of your life listening to string quartets or being at plays or going to a museum and looking at paintings, something should happen to you. You should be changed." Albee was put up for adoption within weeks of his birth in Virginia in 1928 and ended up with the owners of a chain of vaudeville theaters, the New York Times notes. "They didn’t want a writer on their hands. Good God, no," recalled Albee, whose path to becoming a playwright included expulsion from Hartford's Trinity College, moving to Greenwich Village during its heyday as a creative hub, and what he described as failure in all other branches of writing. Albee's partner of 35 years, sculptor Jonathan Thomas, died in 2005. The AP reports that before surgery several years ago, Albee wrote this statement, to be issued on his death: "To all of you who have made my being alive so wonderful, so exciting and so full, my thanks and all my love."