William Gibson was born in the Bronx, a borough in New York City, in 1914. As an adult, he became fascinated with Anne Sullivan's famous triumph as the teacher of a deaf and blind girl named Helen Keller. Sullivan had herself been half-blind as a child and had experienced obstacles that confronted the disabled. Through Sullivan's letters, Gibson learned about the almshouses to which disabled children were often abandoned. Anne Sullivan's subsequent achievements, especially her heroic efforts to communicate with Helen Keller, served as the cornerstone of Gibson's play The Miracle Worker.
Almshouses. Institutions called "almshouses" or "asylums" sprang up in eighteenth-century America to house a wide-ranging collection of society's outcasts. Modeled on the English workhouse system, most almshouses tried to defray their costs by using inmates for forced labor. Male and female inmates took on chores in the daily maintenance of the asylum, which paid for some expenses, but other practices met with less success. Forcing youngsters into labor contracts with outside employers generally failed, and small enterprises (manufacturing sheets and towels in almshouse factories, for example) proved unprofitable in all but the most depressed economic times.
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