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Shapey feels that the award may have had its greatest impact in enhancing his reputation: "I'm not a household name, but the MacArthur award has made me a more common name. I'm getting greater exposure." A newfound sense of financial security has also been an aid to creativity. Says he: "There's this myth that the artist has to starve in the attic, but that's romantic nonsense. I can write just as good music on a full stomach as on an empty stomach—and maybe it's even better."
Ophthalmologist Randolph Whitfield Jr.: $220,000 in 1982. The award came just as an idealistic and successful program he founded was about to collapse for lack of funds. During the past eleven years, Whitfield has directed an internationally acclaimed effort to reduce avoidable blindness among tribes in rural Kenya. At Nyeri Provincial Hospital near snow-capped Mount Kenya, Whitfield trains paramedics and clinical officers in outlying districts to combat such prevalent eye diseases as glaucoma and trachoma. He also conducts pioneering surveys that trace the spread of blindness in deprived areas.
The MacArthur funds, says Whitfield, will help his program "just to survive—the amount of equipment or drugs that could be bought with my monthly salary isn't likely to have much effect on the problems of blindness in Kenya." The training methods that Whitfield can continue to develop, thanks to the MacArthur donation, have been adopted for use by the World Health Organization in other Third World countries.
Novelist Leslie Marmon Silko: $176,000 in 1981. Before receiving her award, Silko was an assistant professor of English at the University of Arizona. "I was sliding into despair. I might have thrown in the towel," she says. "Teaching just didn't give me the time I need for writing." Silko, who is a Laguna Pueblo Indian, now lives with her two sons on a small ranch in the Tucson Mountains. She has finished a screenplay, intended for public television, that is based on an Indian fable about an encounter with evil. She also reports "good progress" on her second novel, which retells the history of the Western Hemisphere from an Indian perspective. Her first novel, Ceremony, published in 1977 by Viking, was about a distraught Indian veteran of World War II. Although praised by critics, the book sold only 7,500 copies.
Silko's award means more to her than sustenance. "It released something," she says. "It has given me ideas. When you have the luxury of time, it changes something inside. You're a little less beholden to the everyday world. And I don't have to put up with teaching Mickey Mouse undergraduates any more."
Journalist Richard Critchfield: $244,000 in 1981. "At 50," says Critchfield, "I was an aging freelance reporter who wrote about Third World villages and was finding it harder to make a go of it." The grant helped him conquer those concerns. "I'm saving the whole thing and then I'm going to live off the interest," says Critchfield. "It's income forever, and it affects your writing. It becomes freer. Your anxiety level drops."