American playwright Edward Albee, who died Sept. 16, made a couple of memorable visits to Bowdoin in the last decade. In 2009, he was awarded an honorary degree. In 2008, he gave a Common Hour talk and spent over an hour with 30 “spellbound” theater students, discussing “his approaches to character, dialogue, plot, and stage direction—right down to the semicolon and comma.”

Albee accrued over 80 years of living and writing some of the most treasured plays of the 20th century canon, including Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Zoo Story, and A Delicate Balance. Read about Albee’s visit to Bowdoin in 2008.