No playwright blasted away at the foundations of American complacency with more zest than Edward Albee, author of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’’, who died Friday at 88.

Albee’s insights were withering, his gaze as pitiless as an X-ray. The playwright consistently sought to chart the fault lines in the American psyche and to show us what we are capable of. A witty but cold-eyed teller of what he saw as the truth, he rigorously measured off the distance between our idea of ourselves and the messy reality. Any short list of the greatest American playwrights has to include Albee.

As early as 1961, well before the decade’s political and social upheaval led to a widespread questioning of commonly accepted values, Albee produced a scorching satire provocatively titled “The American Dream,’’ about a couple, named Mommy and Daddy, who had systematically destroyed their child. In his preface to an edition of the play, Albee described it as “a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen.’’ He added: “Is the play offensive? I certainly hope so; it was my intention to offend — as well as amuse and entertain.’’

That could virtually stand as a manifesto for many dramatists who followed him. And, indeed, Albee’s fingerprints are all over the culture today, detectable in dramas of alienation among the upper-middle-class like Matthew Weiner’s “Mad Men’’ that seek to peel back the facade of social propriety to reveal the hypocrisy and deceit within. Unhappy families, discordant marriages, and sudden eruptions of violence in seemingly banal situations are now commonplace on the stage, on television, and in the movies — all part of Albee’s legacy.

“If you’re willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly,’’ Albee once said, and he lived his own precept. The playwright won the Pulitzer Prize for drama three times — for “A Delicate Balance,’’ “Seascape,’’ and “Three Tall Women’’ — but he was in and out of critical favor over the course of his long career.

Albee’s masterpiece, of course, is 1962’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’’, a blistering portrait of a marriage between George, a history professor at a New England college, and his wife, Martha, the daughter of the college’s president. Their endless cycle of mutual recriminations revolve around an imaginary child, culminating in a haunting ending. The play — which was adapted into a movie in 1966, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, directed by Mike Nichols — presented marriage as a take-no-prisoners arena of domestic combat, of psycho-dynamics and hidden wounds and long-delayed revenge.

When a production of the play opened at Boston’s Colonial Theatre in 1963, producers agreed, under pressure from the city’s censor, to delete the “irreverent use of the Lord’s name’’ from the production. But the play outlasted the censors, and its influence on succeeding generations of dramatists was not hard to discern.

Few were Albee’s equal when it came to psychological complexity and to evoking states of unease or disorientation. In “The Zoo Story’’ (1959), an intrusive man named Jerry engages a publishing executive named Peter in conversation on a park bench that escalates into increasingly disconcerting territory before the play climaxes in an act of horrifying violence. In “A Delicate Balance’’ (1966), the life of an affluent couple is disrupted and destabilized when longtime friends arrive at their house, bringing with them an aura of nameless dread and terror — and refusing to leave.

The critic Harold Bloom once called Albee “the crucial American dramatist of his generation,’’ describing him as the “decisive link’’ between an earlier generation that included Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Thornton Wilder, and the newer-generation likes of ­David Mamet and Sam Shepard.

There is no shortage of problems in contemporary American life for the current generation of dramatists to tackle. Edward Albee left a pretty clear road map of how it can be done.

Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.