Edward Albee on Samuel Beckett - James Grissom

Every life has its defining moments, birth and death being the most pervasive parentheses, I suppose, but along the way there are others—one’s first accompanied sexual experience (and the subsequent realization that the second is far better, and the third even better), the first experience of another’s death (and the growing awareness of the inevitability of one’s own), first love, first loss; so much. And, if one is a writer, the first awareness (through the work of others) that one must be, is! one, as well. Then the growth, the absorption of influences (taking, rejecting), leading—if one is talented and self-aware enough—to the fact of self as writer. I came on playwriting late-ish, having first failed as poet, novelist, short fiction fashioner, and essayist in my teens and early twenties. Writing The Zoo Story (my first completed, individual attempt at the form) in 1958 led quickly to its world premiere (though in Germany, in German) in 1959, and even quicker to its New York premie

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