Gloria Albee

1931 - 2019

Gloria M. Albee
Playwright, feminist, and activist intellectual
Gloria M. Albee, a playwright, feminist, and activist intellectual, died peacefully at Morristown Memorial Hospital on May 10, 2019. She was 88 years old.
She was born in 1931 in Brockton, Mass., and spent her early years in and around Boston.
She was predeceased by her father, Earl Fredric Albee; her mother, Rita Marie Walls Albee; her ex-husband, Leonard Goodman; her daughter, Anna Albee Goodman; and her close friend and colleague, Allan Brick.
Gloria was a perpetual student of life and literature who acted on her beliefs. She attended Boston University, the University of Washington, Sarah Lawrence College, Scottsdale Community College, and Hunter College, where she edited the literary magazine The Returning Woman in the 1980s.
In 1977, she co-chaired Action for Women in Theatre, which produced a report on discrimination against women playwrights and directors. In 1972-73, she worked on a Feminist Amicus Brief supporting Roe v. Wade.
Gloria's plays include The Yellow Wallpaper; Nothing Personal; Bringing the War Home; Helen of Sparta; and Medea. She was a member of the Dramatists Guild of New York, N.Y.
She received the following grants and awards: The National Arts Club Literary Scholarship for Poetry (1990), the John Golden Theatre Award at Hunter College (1986), "Women in Community Activities" Fellowship Grant, Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, Sarah Lawrence College (1975).
In the 1980s, she worked as a typesetter at World Press Review, a foreign affairs magazine in New York. She then moved to Scottsdale, Ariz., and later returned to New York.
After moving to the Lillian Booth Actors Fund Home in Englewood, N.J., Gloria appeared in the film, "Still Dreaming" (by Hank Rogerson and Jilann Spitzmiller), about seniors performing Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Her last years were spent at the Runnells Center for Rehabilitation & Health Care in Berkeley Heights, N.J., where her warm smile continued to engage staff and visitors until the end.
Gloria will be long remembered by her friends, and by scholars, who may learn of her life through her collected papers in the archives of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.