Stockbridge, United States, November 29: William Gibson, a Tony Award-winning American playwright and novelist, has died at the age of 94 in Massachusetts.
The legendary playwright, best known for the Broadway hit "The Miracle Worker," died Tuesday in Stockbridge, Mass., a representative of the Finnerty & Stevens Funeral Home in Great Barrington confirmed on Friday.
Gibson’s agent, Mary Ann Anderson, also confirmed his death yesterday. However, neither Anderson nor any member of the family revealed the cause of his death.
Born in the Bronx, New York City, in 1914, Gibson wrote more than a dozen plays, but it was "The Miracle Worker" that was his biggest success.
"The Miracle Worker," first played on Broadway in 1959, documented the inspirational story of a young deaf and blind Helen Keller forging a relationship with her teacher, Annie Sullivan. It won Tony Awards in 1960 for best play, best director, while Anne Bancroft was named best actress.
Gibson rewrote the Keller-Sullivan relationship in the sequel “Monday after the Miracle” in 1982. Nearly half a century later, the play is still performed at regional theaters around the country.
His other famous works include the Tony Award-nominated "Two for the Seesaw" that opened on Broadway in 1958, "A Mass for the Dead" (1968), an autobiographical family chronicle; A Cry of Players (1968), a speculative account of the life of young William Shakespeare; Goodly Creatures (1980), about Puritan dissident Anne Hutchinson, and Monday After the Miracle (1982), a continuation of the Keller story.
His "Golda" (1977) and its revised version "Golda's Balcony" (2003), were two productions about the life of the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. The latter version had set a record as the longest-running one-woman play in Broadway history on January 2, 2005.
In 1954, Gibson published a novel, The Cobweb, set at a psychiatric hospital resembling the Menninger Clinic. In 1955, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer adapted the novel as a movie.
Besides novels, Gibson wrote many poems, short stories and plays over the course of his writing career that lasted seven decades.
Gibson married Margaret Brenman-Gibson, a psychotherapist and biographer of Odets, in 1940. She died in 2004.
Gibson is survived by his two sons- Daniel, who lives in Cambridge, Mass., and Thomas, who lives in Stockbridge.
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