Edward Albee launched his career with a series of one-act plays. As he records in the 1960 preface to one of them, The American Dream: “I have, in my brief . . . three years, five plays, two of them but fifteen minutes long.” With these five plays - The Zoo Story (1959), The American Dream (1961), and The Death of Bessie Smith (1960), plus the shorter The Sandbox (1960) and FAM and YAM (1960) - Albee is credited with changing the course of American theatre history. Many critics, including Harold Clurman from whose review I take my subtitle, greeted Albee with unbounded enthusiasm. Alan Schneider, acclaimed director of The American Dream and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), believed Albee's early plays were the “most original and powerful work I'd come across in years.” Martin Esslin honored these breakout one-acts as the “promising and brilliant first examples of an American contribution to the Theatre of the Absurd.”