William Gibson

An author of plays, poetry, fiction, and criticism, William Gibson (born 1914) is best known for his drama The Miracle Worker (1959). Praised for its honest, unsentimental treatment of the relationship between Helen Keller, a woman born deaf, blind and mute who grew up to became a nationally celebrated writer and public figure, and Annie Sullivan, the nurse who teaches Helen language and morals, The Miracle Worker remains Gibson's most admired and revived work.

Although Gibson's works have been variously faulted as superficially realistic dramas that sentimentalize the serious issues they raise, Gibson is praised for his accurate ear for dialogue and strong command of dramatic conflict. Robert Brustein observed: "Gibson possesses substantial literary and dramatic gifts, and an integrity of the highest order. In addition, he brings to his works authentic compassion, wit, bite, and humor, and a lively, literate prose style equalled by few American dramatists."

Gibson was born in New York City, where he attended City College of New York from 1930 to 1932. Following his graduation, he supported himself as a piano teacher in Kansas while pursuing an interest in theater. His earliest plays, produced in Topeka, were light comedies that Gibson revised and restaged during his later career. The first, A Cry of Players (1948), concerns a sixteenth-century English playwright named Will who is prompted to leave his wife and family for the life of the London theater, while the second, Dinny and the Witches (1948), features as its eponymous protagonist a Faustian character who is sentenced to death by three comic witches for having stopped "the clock of eternal time." Gibson first achieved widespread popular success with Two for the Seesaw (1958), his first major play produced in New York City. Set in New York in the 1880s, this work combines humor and melodrama to depict the relationship between Gittel Mosca, an overgenerous, unemployed dancer, and Jerry Ryan, a selfish Nebraska lawyer who becomes involved in a love affair with Gittel while preparing to divorce his wife. Although Jerry leaves Gittel to return to his wife, Gibson concludes the play by implying that Gittel has gained from the brief relationship by becoming more self-assertive, while Jerry has learned humility and concern for others. Characterizing Two for the Seesaw as a casual entertainment, most critics praised the play's brisk dialogue and Gibson's compassionate treatment of his characters. Brooks Atkinson commented: "By the time the curtain comes down, you are not so much aware that Mr. Gibson has brought off a technical stunt as that he has looked inside the hearts of two admirable people and made a charming full-length play out of them."

Gibson achieved his greatest success with The Miracle Worker. Originally written and performed as a television drama, the play was later adapted for stage and film. Although realistic in tone, The Miracle Worker often makes use of cinematic shifts in time and space to illuminate the effect of the past on the present in a manner analogous to Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Using innovative lighting and onstage set changes, Gibson juxtaposes Helen's present quest for language and meaningful human connection with the past experiences of Annie Sullivan, the "miracle worker" of the title who was partially cured of childhood blindness through surgical operations during her adolescence. Summoned to the Keller home in Tuscumbia, Alabama, Annie becomes locked in a test of wills with Helen as well as her family, who have allowed Helen to become spoiled and uncooperative due to their pity for her and attendant refusal to administer discipline. Although faulted as superficial or exploitative by some reviewers, The Miracle Worker has been praised for Gibson's alternately heroic, humorous, and sympathetic treatment of Annie and Helen's struggle for human language and love. Walter Kerr asserted: "[Gibson has] dramatized the living mind in its incredible energy, in its determination to express itself in violence when it cannot arrange itself into thought.... When it comes, the physical contact of the child and the teacher--a contact that is for the first time meaningful and for the first time affectionate--is overwhelming."

In his nonfiction volume The Seesaw Log and Two for the Seesaw (1959), Gibson combines the text of Two for the Seesaw with a chronicle of his participation in initial productions of that play and The Miracle Worker. Asserting that the producer and director of both productions had taken commercial liberties that obscured the artistic integrity of his plays, Gibson largely withdrew from the New York theater during the 1960s and 1970s. His last major play for the New York stage, Golden Boy (1964), is a musical adaptation of Clifford Odets's book of the same title about the moral consequences that confront a talented black boxer after he accidentally kills a man in the boxing ring. Gibson's miscellaneous works of the 1960s and 1970s also include A Mass for the Dead (1968), a family chronicle about Gibson and his ancestors; A Season in Heaven (1974), a chronicle of specific events in Gibson's immediate family; and Shakespeare's Game (1978), a volume of theoretical drama criticism that borrows terminology from chess and psychology to explain relationships between scenes and between author and audience.

While William Gibson has published poetry, plays, fiction, and criticism, he is best known for his 1957 play The Miracle Worker. Originally written and performed as a television drama, and adapted in later years for both stage and screen, The Miracle Worker remains Gibson's most widely revived piece. It was refilmed for television in 1979 and also formed the basis for Gibson's 1982 play, Monday after the Miracle, which picks up the characters almost twenty years later. Writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Stephen C. Coy calls the drama "a classic American play--and television play, and film--the full stature of which has yet to be realized."

The story, which is based on real people and actual events, concerns the relationship between Helen Keller, a handicapped child who has been deaf and blind since infancy, and Annie Sullivan, the formerly blind teacher who has been called in to instruct her. When Annie arrives, she finds that Helen has been utterly spoiled by well-intentioned parents who, in their sympathy, allow her to terrorize the household. Annie's efforts to civilize Helen and Helen's resistance result in a fierce, and frequently physical, struggle that forms the central conflict of the play. The "miracle" occurs when, after months of frustration, Annie is finally able to reach the child. Coy explains: "Just as the struggle appears to be lost, Helen starts to work the pump in the Keller yard and the miracle--her mind learning to name things--happens before the audience as she feels the water and the wet ground. Annie and others realize what is happening as Helen, possessed, runs about touching things and learning names, finally, to their great joy, `Mother' and `Papa.' The frenzy slows as Helen realizes there is something she needs to know, gets Annie to spell it for her, spells it back, and goes to spell it for her mother. It is the one word which more than any other describes the subject of The Miracle Worker: `Teacher.'"

Praising the play's "youthfulness and vigor," the New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther described the tremendous concentration of energy apparent in the battle scenes between Helen and Annie: "The physical vitality and passion are absolutely intense as the nurse, played superbly by Anne Bancroft moves in and takes on the job of `reaching the soul' of the youngster, played by Patty Duke.... When the child, who is supposed to be Helen Keller in her absolutely primitive childhood state, kicks and claws with the frenzy of a wild beast at the nurse who is supposed to be Annie Sullivan, the famous instructor of Miss Keller, it is a staggering attack. And when Annie hauls off and swats her or manhandles her into a chair and pushes food into her mouth to teach her habits, it is enough to make the viewer gasp and grunt."

The Broadway production of the play was so well-received that a film version with the same stars was made in 1962 and enjoyed similar success. Later revivals have not fared so well. When The Miracle Worker was filmed for television in 1979 (with Patty Duke playing Annie Sullivan), Tom Shales commented in the Washington Post that the only point in doing The Miracle Worker again "was to give Patty Duke Astin a chance on the other side of the food." His objections range from what he calls "careless casting" to the inappropriateness (almost an insult, he calls it) of making a television movie from a screenplay written for live television. For the writing itself, however, Shales has nothing but praise. "William Gibson's play ... remains, even when not perfectly done, a nearly perfect joy, one of the most assuredly affirmative dramatic works to come out of the optimistic '50s."

Gibson continues to write for television. He worked with science fiction writer Tom Maddox on an epsiode of The X-Files in 1998.

Historical Context

• The Life and Times of William Gibson (1914-)
• At the time of Gibson's birth:
• Woodrow Wilson was president of the United States.
• The first full-length feature film in color, The World, The Flesh and the Devil, was produced and shown in London
• The first national Mother's Day was proclaimed by President Wilson
• The times:
• 1914-1918: World War I
• 1939-1945: World War II
• 1950-1953: Korean War
• 1957-1975: Vietnam War
• Gibson's contemporaries:
• Joe Louis (1914-1981) American boxer
• Frank Sinatra (1915-) American pop singer
• Billie Holiday (1915-1959) American jazz singer
• Mary Kay Ash (1915-) American cosmetics businesswoman
• Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) American civil rights organizer
• Billy Graham (1918-) American evangelist
• Ray Charles (1918-) American R&B musician
• Selected world events:
• 1914: Northern and southern Nigeria were united
• 1921: Heart disease became the leading cause of death in America after 10 years of jockeying for the lead with tuberculosis
• 1927: London broke relations with Moscow on May 24, 1927, following accusations of Bolshevik espionage and subversion throughout the British Empire
• 1934: A severe dust storm lifted an estimated 300 million tons of topsoil from Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Colorado, and other states
• 1947: The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) signed by the major world powers will lead to a significant lowering of tariff barriers, end some tariff discrimination, and help revitalize world trade
• 1952: The television show American Bandstand debuted in January 1952 on ABC network stations; host Dick Clark will continue to emcee the show for more than 25 years
• 1961: The Peace Corps of Young Americans for overseas service was created March 1, 1961 by President Kennedy
• 1973: The U.S. passed the Endangered Species Act prohibiting the Federal Government from supporting projects that might jeopardize designated animals
• 1981: On July 29, 1981 Charles, Prince of Wales, married Lady Diana Spencer in a televised ceremony viewed by at least 700 million
• 1990: America's record eight-year economic boom ended in July 1990 as the country goes into recession

Further Reading

• Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 23, Gale, 1983.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 7: Twentieth Century American Dramatists, Gale, 1981.
• America, November 10, 1990, p. 350.
• Cosmopolitan, August, 1958.
• Los Angeles Times, October 19, 1982.
• Nation, December 2, 1968.
• New England Theatre, Spring, 1970.