Gibson, Preston, 1879-1937

BIOGHIST REQUIRED Preston Gibson (1880-1937) was a prominent society figure and a playwright. The son of Randall L. Gibson, U.S. Senator and Representative of Louisiana, Gibson was extremely wealthy. Like his father, he attended Yale University, where he was a star athlete. During World War I, he was one of the first Americans to volunteer with the French army. From 1916 to 1918 he fought with the French Ambulance Corps and the American Ambulance Corps, and received the Croix to Guerre for bravery. Upon returning to the United States he enlisted in the Marines and broke records as a recruiting sergeant.

BIOGHIST REQUIRED Gibson was married and divorced four times: first to Minna Field (niece of Marshall Field and stepdaughter of Thomas Nelson Page), then to Grace McMillan Jarvis (granddaughter of U.S. Senator James McMillan), Beatrice Benjamin Pratt (daughter of the Boston publisher William Everts Benjamin and granddaughter of Henry H. Rogers of the Standard Oil Company), and finally to Evelyn Harris Spaulding. His multiple marriages caused a certain amount of scandal. He had three sons--Henry Field Gibson, James McMillan Gibson, and Henry Spaulding Gibson--and a daughter, Marie Preston Gibson. Gibson died at the age of 57 from heart disease.

BIOGHIST REQUIRED Gibson began to write plays shortly after graduating from Yale in 1900. In 1910 the Hackett Theater in New York produced his play The Turning Point. It received some positive reviews but was heavily criticized when it came to light that certain lines in the play were copied almost exactly from plays by Oscar Wilde, including A Woman of No Importance and The Ideal Husband. Gibson defended himself publicly by saying that he had written the lines and that the accusations put him in the company of writers like Shakespeare who had borrowed ideas from other works. Aside from this production, he achieved little success as a writer, though he completed at least a dozen plays. His third wife, Beatrice Pratt, is listed as a coauthor on a number of his works.

BIOGHIST REQUIRED A member of the Metropolitan and Chevy Chase clubs of Washington D.C; the Yale, Lambs, Strollers, and Players clubs of New York; and others in cities in the U.S. and abroad, Gibson was much better known as a society figure than as a writer.

From the guide to the Preston Gibson Papers, 1903-1920., (Columbia University. Rare Book and Manuscript Library)