Edward Albee, one of the best playwrights America has ever produced, just died.

At the end of his privileged youth, the future dramatist worked delivering telegrams and selling music albums at Bloomingdale’s, and he didn’t care to advance much technologically beyond the record player and the typewriter. Albee despised Digital Era tools, never wanting to own a smartphone or look at the Internet, haughtily sneering at them the way intelligentsia in an earlier age derided TV as the “idiot box.” His New York Times obituary includes this 2012 quote from the writer: “All of my plays are about people missing the boat, closing down too young, coming to the end of their lives with regret at things not done.” Whether or not that applies to his defiant technophobia or not depends on your perspective. At any rate, it worked for him.

From Claudine Ko’s 2010 Vice Q&A:

Question:

Do you have a specific writing space?

Edward Albee:

I do my writing in my head. There are tables around for whenever I feel like writing something down. I don’t care where I do it. It’s called a manuscript, so I write by hand.

Question:

That’s pretty old school.

Edward Albee:

I don’t believe in all those machines.

Question:

And the internet?

Edward Albee:

I know it exists. I don’t use it.

Question:

Do you have a cell phone?

Edward Albee:

No. It’s a waste of time. I might as well watch television. I walk along the streets of New York and I find people bumping into each other, bumping into things, and they have these things in their ears or in their face. They’re not seeing anything of the real world.•