As a student at the Yale School of Drama in the late 1950s, Linney was an actor. He later became a director and started his writing career in the early 1960s as a novelist, publishing Heathen Valley, before he found his voice as a playwright.
Throughout his career, he has written about many different subjects. In The Sorrows of Frederick, his first dramatic work produced on the stage, he addresses the psychological struggles of Frederick William II, king of Prussia in the late eighteenth century.
Linney has moved easily from writing about the life of Christ in Old Man Joseph and His Family to capturing small-town life in the South in Holy Ghosts.
Time magazine’s Richard Shickel calls Linney "one of the American theater’s most mysteriously buried treasures." But Linney has received his share of recognition through the years. Time picked Linney’s Laughing Stock as one of the ten best plays of 1984. Linney’s adaptation of his 1962 novel Heathen Valley won the National Critics Award and appears in Best Plays of the Year 1987-88, and he has received two Obie Awards.
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