Edward Franklin Albee III ( A1928 – 2016) was an American playwright known for works such as The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox (1959), and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), Albee was placed for adopted when he was two weeks old and adopted by a theatre owner and a socialite. Some critics have argued that some of Albee's work constitutes an American variant of what Martin Esslin identified and named the Theater of the Absurd. Three of his plays won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and two of his other works won the Tony Award for Best Play. Younger American playwrights, such as Paula Vogel, credit Albee's mix of theatricality and biting dialogue with helping to reinvent postwar American theatre in the early 1960s.