the last book I ever read (Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, excerpt two)

from Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Philip Gefter:

The absence of affection at home would weigh on his performance at school. “I was pathologically shy when I was a child,” Albee said. “Really, I didn’t talk much.” He was disaffected enough to refuse to do his schoolwork or even to abide by the rules. “No sooner would my well-intentioned family get me into one boarding school—Lawrenceville, for example, in Princeton, New Jersey—when I would get myself thrown out,” Albee explained. “I think it was nothing more complex than my desire to be at home and my family’s desire to have me away.” By the time he was fourteen, his parents had enrolled him at Valley Forge Military Academy. J. D. Salinger, who predated him there by six years, later modeled Holden Caulfield’s school, Pencey Prep, after what Albee referred to as “Valley Forge Concentration Camp.” “I did not write Catcher in the Rye,” Albee said, recognizing some of Holden’s qualities in his own petulant teenage years. “I lived it.”