William Gibson

By The Week Staff

last updated 8 January 2015

The persistent playwright who wrote The Miracle Worker

William Gibson

1914–2008

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Before he broke through as a writer, William Gibson acted, played piano, and helped organize the Young Communist League. His wife, a psychoanalyst, supported him financially for the first 15 years of their marriage. Gibson was 45 when his drama The Miracle Worker reached Broadway and won six Tony awards, including Best Play of 1960. “Good things come to those who wait,” he said, “far too long.”

“As a youth in Brooklyn, Gibson loved writing, making his own ‘scrappy imitations’ of boy books such as those of the Rover Boys and Tom Swift,” said The Hartford Courant. After dropping out of college, he sold a few poems and short stories, but wallowed in obscurity until he published his first novel, The Cobweb, at age 40; it became a successful 1955 film with Richard Widmark and Lauren Bacall. His 1958 play Two for the Seesaw, which on Broadway starred Henry Fonda and Anne Bancroft, was turned into a movie featuring Robert Mitchum and Shirley MacLaine.

But Gibson declined to settle in Hollywood, moving instead to Massachusetts to focus on his plays. “In the theater, no one wants to give you any money but you own every word,” he explained. “In the movies, they’ll give you a fortune but you don’t own a comma.”

The Miracle Worker was the inspirational story of how Annie Sullivan taught her blind and deaf pupil, Helen Keller, to communicate with the outside world, said The New York Times. As Sullivan and Keller, Bancroft and Patty Duke repeated their theater roles for the 1962 film version, which won them both Academy Awards and an Oscar nomination for Gibson, who wrote the script. “It was obviously a love letter,” he said. “I like to fall a little in love with my heroines, and the title—from Mark Twain, who said, ‘Helen is a miracle, and Miss Sullivan is the miracle worker’—was meant to show where my affections lay.”

Gibson won a Tony nomination for his 1965 musical adaptation of Clifford Odets’ play Golden Boy. And although his 1977 drama Golda, about Golda Meir, was a flop, he reworked it as the successful 2003 Broadway show Golda’s Balcony.