American drama (Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller)

In Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953), American literature had its first great dramatist. American drama before O'Neill consisted mostly of shows and entertainments. O'Neill dominated American drama in his generation; he can be said to have "put it on the map." His plays were widely produced abroad, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936.

Next to O'Neill's, the most distinguished American plays of the 1930's and 1940's were by Thornton Wilder, also a novelist of excellence.

During the post-World War II period, four dramatists in particular left their mark: William Inge (1913-1973), Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), Arthur Miller (1915-2005), and Edward Albee (b. 1928).

Inge's Picnic (1953), Bus Stop (1955), and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957) show greater technical strength than originality of theme. At his best Inge is a master of dialogue, as he presents modern man's fear and trembling and self-deceits. So too is Edward Franklin Albee III, whose savage dialogues of academic intellectuals in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) frighteningly balance the serenity of Wilder's Our Town as a rendering of life in America. Albee's The Zoo Story (1959) and The American Dream (1961) were earlier studies of mankind frustrated by the imposition of an ideal. The ambitious Tiny Alice (1964) was a frustration for both characters and audience.

Edward Albee’s works are considered well-crafted and often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflect a mastery and Americanization of the Absurdism that found its peak in works by European playwrights such as Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco. Younger American playwrights, such as Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel, credit Albee's daring mix of theatricalism and biting dialogue with helping to reinvent the post-war American theatre in the early 1960s. Albee's dedication to continuing to evolve his voice -- as evidenced in later productions such as The Goat or Who is Sylvia? (2000) - also routinely marks him as distinct from other American playwrights of his era.

Of the four American playwrights mentioned above, Williams and Miller stand out. The post-World War II years brought Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams to prominence in American drama: although other playwrights, such as William Inge, have contributed striking and effective plays, Miller and Williams remain the dominant figures of the second half of the century. They represent the two principal movements in modern American drama: realism, and realism combined with an attempt at something more imaginative. From the beginning, American playwrights have tried to break away from realism or to blend it with more poetic expression, as in Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949), Williams's The Glass Menagerie (1944), and Thornton Wilder's Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth.

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