Edward Albee, a three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, died last Friday at the age of 88 after a short illness.

In a tribute to Albee for the New Yorker, Hilton Als describes the playwright as “the youngest of the three artists who reshaped the architecture of the postwar American theatre—Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller completed the trinity.” Albee distinguished himself from these contemporaries, Als writes, in the treatment of his protagonists: Albee is characteristically “skeptical if not down right distrustful of what his characters said, and how they said it.”

Peter Marks’s similarly glowing obituary of Albee in the Washington Post describes Albee as a “maestro of linguistic control of international caliber... on a par with his fellows in the pantheons on modernism and absurdism, Ireland’s Samuel Beckett and Britain’s Harold Pinter.” Marks laments how Albee “eluded the Nobel Committee” leaving a “lamentable missing passage on an extraordinary resume.”

Albee’s work was also, at least in part, shaped by a childhood of cruelty at home, Als adds.

“You know, if anyone wants me to say it, in one sentence, what my plays are about: They’re about the nature of identity,” Albee once told NPR. “Who we are, how we permit ourselves to be viewed, how permit ourselves to view ourselves, how we practice identity or lack of identity.” He added, “These people who adopted me I didn’t like very much and they didn’t like me very much, I don’t think. We didn’t belong in the same family.”

The personal struggle seemed to pay off; Ben Brantley, a chief theater critic for the New York Times, said to NPR, “Is there anyone else who dares to take on questions that are that big? I’m not talking about questions of politics or immediate topical issues. Edward Albee asks questions—the most basic existential questions—he confronts death, he confronts sex with, I think, eyes that remain very wide open.”

Albee arrived at the scene of playwriting in 1960 with The Zoo Story—a play about a shocking encounter between two men in Central Park. His career was cemented with the 1962 premiere of his first full-length play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which ran on Broadway for almost two years and won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and a Tony Award for Best Play. It was also adapted for the screen in 1966, starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

Albee won his last major prize, a Tony, for the Broadway produced play The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia, at age 74. Director Aaron Posner will revive Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at Ford’s Theatre this winter.

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