Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of Edward Albee, who has died at the age of 88, was to have been one of the few to reverse the rapid downward curve from life-changing success to life-threatening neglect to which great US literary careers are depressingly prone.

Having made so much money in the 1960s from his marital bloodbath drama Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that he was able to set up an Edward F Albee Foundation to fund struggling artists, Albee experienced a most vertiginous example of the Am Lit dip, becoming unloved by critics and too fond of the bottle in his middle years. Unusually, however, he re-emerged sober and productive on the other side, clutching new trophies.

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Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, the senior members of the triumvirate who dominated serious Broadway drama in the middle third of the 20th century, saw their later plays unproduced or ridiculed in the US. In contrast, Albee won two Pulitzer prizes three decades apart – for A Delicate Balance in 1967 and Three Tall Women in 1994, with another for Seascape in 1975 in between. He achieved an even greater longevity of popularity at the Tony awards, where he took home statuettes for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1963 and then The Goat in 2002.

Albee would have had four Pulitzers, matching the record set by Eugene O’Neill, had the award’s board not vetoed the judges’ decision to give the 1964 trophy to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Board members objected to the “vulgarity” of its depiction of a vicious academic party in which an unhappy drunken couple bait and humiliate their guests. The Tony judges, recognising the marital invective as dramatic dialogue of high linguistic invention and psychological insight, look more sensible today, where Albee’s play stands as a modern American classic.

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Albee failed to escape the cultural risk of being best known for a work that was not his best. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? has the higher profile – partly due to a 1966 movie version that became indelibly enmeshed with the messy private lives of its stars, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton – but there is a gathering critical consensus that his masterpiece was A Delicate Balance.

In that 1966 drama, a wealthy couple in the US suburbs are disturbed by a visit from their neighbours, another prosperous pair, who are seeking sanctuary from their own home, where they feel unable to stay after suddenly being visited by a “nameless dread”. The mood of the play, written during the cold war, has been attributed to the serious possibility of nuclear war, but recent revivals have seemed to depict much broader social, sexual and existential anxieties, the feeling that the poet Philip Larkin described as “the solving emptiness that lies just under all we do”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the 1966 film of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros.

Albee’s quintet of Pulitzer or Tony-winning plays gives a good sense of the style and scope of his work. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and A Delicate Balance are examples of his ability to take a conservative theatrical form – the social or family drama – and make it dangerous and uneasy through knife-edge, knife-sharp dialogue. A similar disjunction between form and content occurs in The Goat, which is about a middle-class architect having an affair, though with the twist that the infidelity involves bestiality with the title character.

Seascape, in which a couple on a beach holiday fall into conversation with a pair of lizards, represented a more openly experimental and surreal streak in Albee’s writing, while Three Tall Women, on the surface his most straightforward work, is fascinating because it is the most admittedly autobiographical of his scripts. Albee described it as “an exorcism” of his adoptive mother, Frances Albee, from whom he became estranged as a teenager. Even this, though, is not a traditional memory play, with sharp stagecraft showing in the deployment of three different performers on stage at the same time - Maggie Smith, Frances de la Tour and Anastasia Hille in the first London version - to play a woman at different ages. If the right cross-generational trio of lanky women performers can be found, Three Tall Women feels due a major revival.

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Albee’s career was unusual in having featured Broadway hits in the 60s, 70s, 90s and the first decade of the 21st century, but it was not one of even achievement. Between Seascape and Three Tall Women, he was involved in a succession of horrible flops. At the start of the 1980s, The Lady from Dubuque closed on Broadway after 12 performances, the same number achieved soon afterwards by Albee’s adaptation of Nabokov’s novel Lolita, and The Man With Three Arms got only as far as its 16th performance. Albee was further infuriated by the conviction of many critics that his strange fable about a man with an extra limb who becomes famous until the extra arm withers was a bitter metaphor for his own rejection by Broadway.

During this run of failures, Albee had regular public confrontations with producers and reviewers that were worsened by stubbornness - a trait the playwright never lost - and drunkenness, which he eventually conquered through Alcoholics Anonymous and the loving encouragement of Jonathan Thomas, a Canadian sculptor with whom he lived in New York for 32 years. The dramatist’s friends saw it as significant that, after Thomas’s death in 2005, Albee soon retired from theatre. His final performed work was Me, Myself and I (2007), a minor variation on his career-long motif of domestic dysfunction surreally presented, in which a mother is unable to tell her two sons apart.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eddie Redmayne and Jonathan Pryce in The Goat at the Almeida theatre in London in 2004. Photograph: Robbie Jack/Corbis via Getty Images

Although Albee disliked critical analysis of his plays, especially when the readings were autobiographical, even he would concede in interviews that the recurrent concern of his plays with ambiguous identity and parental failure - or failure to become parents - was likely rooted in his own experiences. When asked how long it had taken him to write Three Tall Women, he replied “all my life”.

It is said that every man has his price, but Albee was unusual in literally knowing his. He cost $133.30 in 1928 when, at 18 days old, he was purchased from a private New York adoption agency by Reed and Frances Albee. Assiduous research by Mel Gussow for his 1999 biography Edward Albee: A Singular Life traced the paperwork and discovered that the child bought by the Albees had been delivered on 12 March to a woman called Louise Harvey in Washington DC. All that Gussow could discover of the father, which was more than Albee had ever known, was a note in the file that the man involved had “deserted and abandoned both the mother and and the child and had in no way contributed to the support and maintenance of said child”.

The child they named Edward Franklin Albee III always felt that his adoptive parents were inadequate guardians for an artistic, intellectual boy who claimed to have known that he was homosexual from the age of eight, but they did give him a theatrical inheritance. The grandfather after whom he was named ran a major chain of playhouses.

Questions raised by his adoption – had there possibly been a sibling or even a twin, and were his artistry and alcoholism traits of his birth family? – echo through the numerous rootless, sterile, unloved people in his plays. In A Delicate Balance, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Goat in particular, there are people who are haunted by a sense of being imposters, just as Albee was always troubled by his unknowing lottery win in infancy, a poor foundling dropped into a clan of wealth and privilege.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Glenn Close in Albee’s 1967 play A Delicate Balance in New York in 2015. Photograph: Brigitte Lacombe/AP

He claimed the Albees had given him money rather than love, and this family atmosphere may have infected him with a slight patrician chilliness that some of those who met and worked with him found off-putting. When he engaged with someone, though, he was a man of humour, generosity and hospitality, especially in the latter part of his life when he was alcohol-free.

Even in his decades of sobriety, though, Albee had a naturally combative and contrary mind and manner, one of those writers whom drama suits as a form because dialogue arises from argument and opposition. The game of “get the guests” depicted in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was one that he admitted to having played in real life.

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Absolute certainty about how a play should look and sound led him to write detailed directions for staging and delivery – asking for a line of only four words in A Delicate Balance to be delivered “quietly; sadly; cruelly” – and he was furious to hear that an actor in a revival had asked to have a script typed without such prompts. He could also be a terrifying interviewee because - in common with his friend Harold Pinter - he had such respect for language that he carefully examined the vocabulary and premise of every question.

He reserved particularly hostile rhetoric for critical or academic theories with which he disagreed, especially the view that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was a disguised depiction of a gay relationship. He took legal steps to prevent the two warring couples being played by four men. Albee insisted that he would have written about homosexuals if he had wanted to, but typically, when questioned on the later presence of a gay character in The Goat, he would crisply insist that it was the character rather than Albee who had made that decision about sexuality, but the guy’s choice to come out had certainly enriched the play.

Albee’s orneriness with questioners reflected unhealed wounds from his spell in the theatrical wilderness, and the Edward F Albee Foundation will continue to help numerous artists through difficult periods in their careers. Albee himself must privately have taken pleasure in the unique graph of his writing, as the only American dramatist who is likely to be represented in posterity by revivals of plays written in both middle-age - Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and A Delicate Balance - and later life - Three Tall Women and The Goat. If the dip in his career was extreme and dizzying, so too were the twin peaks.