At the end of the 1950s the semi-absurdist plays of Edward Franklin Albee III (1928- ) attracted American audiences with their intelligent dialogue. Edward Albee was adopted as an infant by Reed Albee, the son of Edward Franklin Albee, a powerful (potente) American Vaudeville (forma di teatro popolare) producer. The future writer soon come into conflict (venne in conflitto) against his family and started associating with artists and intellectuals. At 20 Edward moved to New York’s Greenwich Village where he held (fece) a variety of unusual jobs before achieving (raggiungere) his success with The Zoo Story, in 1959. The play gave birth (diede origine) to American absurdist drama and Albee was seen as the leader of a new theatrical movement, the successor to Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O’Neill, but he is more closely related to the European playwrights as Beckett and Harold Pinter. Albee describes his plays as “an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society”. His works are considered well-crafted (ben costruiti), an unsympathetic (distaccato) examination of the modern condition. Among his other famous plays are The Sandbox (1959) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). He also rewrote (riscrisse) the book for the unsuccessful musical Breakfast at Tiffany’s, an adaptation of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1966). Albee continues to experiment in works, such as The Goat: or, Who Is Sylvia? (2002).