Background

Helen Adams Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama, United States. She was the first of two daughters born to Arthur Henley Keller and Katherine Adams Keller. Keller's father had served as an officer in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. She also had two older stepbrothers.

Keller lost both her sight and hearing at just 19 months old. As Keller grew into childhood, she developed a limited method of communication with her companion, Martha Washington, the young daughter of the family cook. The two had created a type of sign language. By the time Keller was 7, they had invented more than 60 signs to communicate with each other.

During this time, Keller had also become very wild and unruly. She would kick and scream when angry, and giggle uncontrollably when happy. She tormented Martha and inflicted raging tantrums on her parents. Many family relatives felt she should be institutionalized.

Education

Keller worked with her teacher Anne Sullivan for 49 years, from 1887 until Sullivan's death in 1936. In 1932, Sullivan experienced health problems and lost her eyesight completely. A young woman named Polly Thomson, who had begun working as a secretary for Keller and Sullivan in 1914, became Keller's constant companion upon Sullivan's death.

Looking for answers and inspiration, Keller's mother came across a travelogue by Charles Dickens, American Notes, in 1886. She read of the successful education of another deaf and blind child, Laura Bridgman, and soon dispatched Keller and her father to Baltimore, Maryland to see specialist Dr. J. Julian Chisolm.

After examining Keller, Chisolm recommended that she see Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, who was working with deaf children at the time. Bell met with Keller and her parents and suggested that they travel to the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston, Massachusetts.

There, the family met with the school's director, Michael Anaganos. He suggested Keller work with one of the institute's most recent graduates, Sullivan.

On March 3, 1887, Sullivan went to Keller's home in Alabama and immediately went to work. She began by teaching six-year-old Keller finger spelling, starting with the word "doll," to help Keller understand the gift of a doll she had brought along. Other words would follow.

In 1890, Keller began speech classes at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf in Boston. She would toil for 25 years to learn to speak so that others could understand her.

From 1894 to 1896, Keller attended the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York City. There, she worked on improving her communication skills and studied regular academic subjects.

Around this time, Keller became determined to attend college. In 1896, she attended the Cambridge School for Young Ladies, a preparatory school for women.

As her story became known to the general public, Keller began to meet famous and influential people. One of them was the writer Mark Twain, who was very impressed with her. They became friends. Twain introduced her to his friend Henry H. Rogers, a Standard Oil executive.

Rogers was so impressed with Keller's talent, drive, and determination that he agreed to pay for her to attend Radcliffe College. There, she was accompanied by Sullivan, who sat by her side to interpret lectures and texts. By this time, Keller had mastered several methods of communication, including touch-lip reading, Braille, speech, typing, and finger-spelling.

Keller graduated, cum laude, from Radcliffe College in 1904, at the age of 24.

Career

Having developed skills never approached by any similarly disabled person, Helen Keller began to write of blindness, a subject then taboo in women’s magazines because of the relationship of many cases to venereal disease. Edward W. Bok accepted her articles for the Ladies' Home Journal, and other major magazines - The Century, McClure’s, and The Atlantic Monthly - followed suit.

Keller wrote of her life in several books, including The Story of My Life (1903), Optimism (1903), The World I Live In (1908), My Religion (1927), Helen Keller's Journal (1938), and The Open Door (1957). In 1913 she began lecturing (with the aid of an interpreter), primarily on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind, for which she later established a $2 million endowment fund, and her lecture tours took her several times around the world. She co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union with American civil rights activist Roger Nash Baldwin and others in 1920. Her efforts to improve the treatment of the deaf and the blind were influential in removing the disabled from asylums. She also prompted the organization of commissions for the blind in 30 states by 1937.

In 1946, Keller was appointed counselor of international relations for the American Foundation of Overseas Blind. Between 1946 and 1957, she traveled to 35 countries on five continents.

In 1955, at age 75, Keller embarked on the longest and most grueling trip of her life: a 40,000-mile, five-month trek across Asia. Through her many speeches and appearances, she brought inspiration and encouragement to millions of people.

Keller's autobiography, The Story of My Life, was used as the basis for the 1957 television drama The Miracle Worker. In 1959, the story was developed into a Broadway play of the same title, starring Patty Duke as Keller and Anne Bancroft as Sullivan. The two actresses also performed those roles in the 1962 award-winning film version of the play.

Achievements

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  Helen Keller's courageous life is the source of great inspiration, especially to differently-abled people. She stood as a powerful example of how determination, hard work, and imagination can allow an individual to triumph over adversity. By overcoming difficult conditions with a great deal of persistence, she grew into a respected and world-renowned activist who labored for the betterment of others.
  
  During her lifetime, Keller received many honors in recognition of her accomplishments, including the Theodore Roosevelt Distinguished Service Medal in 1936, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964, and the election to the Women's Hall of Fame in 1965.
  
  Keller also received honorary doctoral degrees from Temple University and Harvard University and from the universities of Glasgow, Scotland; Berlin, Germany; Delhi, India; and Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She was named an Honorary Fellow of the Educational Institute of Scotland.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The World I Live In

    (The World I live In (1908) offers Helen Keller's remarkab...)

    1908
  • Light in My Darkness

    (One of Time's women of the century, Helen Keller, reveals...)

    1927
  • The Story of My Life

    (Helen Keller is a name associated with success in overcom...)

    1903

Religion

Helen Keller was a proponent of the religious teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg and propagated them to a wider readership in books and articles. John Hitz, superintendent of Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Bureau was the one to introduce her to them. Hitz, already an elderly gentleman with a long white beard when Helen met him, had been born in Switzerland and was an ardent Swedenborgian. Before she met Hitz Helen had corresponded with Phillips Brooks, the famous Boston Episcopalian preacher (and author of the hymn O Little Town of Bethlehem) and himself a reader of Swedenborg. A question that Bishop Brooks had been unable to answer concerned the apparent condemnation of Jews and other non-Christians. It was only when Hitz put into her hands a Braille version of Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell that she learned that this was not so.

Keller wrote later in life that she had been a strong believer in the doctrines of Emanuel Swedenborg since she was sixteen years old. Swedenborg's teachings led her to support humanitarian causes like women's suffrage, and the demands for justice from their employers by workers.

Politics

Soon after she graduated from college, Keller became a member of the Socialist Party, most likely due in part to her friendship with John Macy. Between 1909 and 1921, she wrote several articles about socialism and supported Eugene Debs, a Socialist Party presidential candidate. Her series of essays on socialism, entitled "Out of the Dark," described her views on socialism and world affairs.

It was during this time that Keller first experienced public prejudice about her disabilities. For most of her life, the press had been overwhelmingly supportive of her, praising her courage and intelligence. But after she expressed her socialist views, some criticized her by calling attention to her disabilities. One newspaper, the Brooklyn Eagle, wrote that her "mistakes sprung out of the manifest limitations of her development."

Views

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Keller tackled social and political issues, including women's suffrage, pacifism, birth control, and socialism.

After college, Keller set out to learn more about the world and how she could help improve the lives of others. News of her story spread beyond Massachusetts and New England. Keller became a well-known celebrity and lecturer by sharing her experiences with audiences and working on behalf of others living with disabilities. She testified before Congress, strongly advocating to improve the welfare of blind people.

In 1915, along with renowned city planner George Kessler, she co-founded Helen Keller International to combat the causes and consequences of blindness and malnutrition. In 1920, she helped found the American Civil Liberties Union.

When the American Federation for the Blind was established in 1921, Keller had an effective national outlet for her efforts. She became a member in 1924 and participated in many campaigns to raise awareness, money, and support for the blind. She also joined other organizations dedicated to helping those less fortunate, including the Permanent Blind War Relief Fund (later called the American Braille Press).

Quotations: "I do not want the peace that passeth understanding. I want the understanding which bringeth peace."

"Tyranny cannot defeat the power of ideas."

"A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships."

"One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar."

"The only real blind person at Christmas-time is he who has not Christmas in his heart."

"The bulk of the world’s knowledge is an imaginary construction."

"Our puny sentimentalism has caused us to forget that a human life is sacred only when it may be of some use to itself and to the world. "

"Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much."

"The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, came to me."

"If it is true that the violin is the most perfect of musical instruments, then Greek is the violin of human thought."

"No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right."

"Tolerance is the first principle of community; it is the spirit which conserves the best that all men think."

"Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement; nothing can be done without hope."

"If I regarded my life from the point of view of the pessimist, I should be undone. I should seek in vain for the light that does not visit my eyes and the music that does not ring in my ears. I should beg night and day and never be satisfied. I should sit apart in awful solitude, a prey to fear and despair. But since I consider it a duty to myself and to others to be happy, I escape a misery worse than any physical deprivation."

Membership

Helen Keller helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union. She was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Woman's Party, and the Industrial Workers of the World.

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  American Civil Liberties Union , United States

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  American Academy of Arts and Letters , United States

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  National Woman's Party , United States

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  Industrial Workers of the World , United States

Personality

Mark Twain said that the two most interesting characters of the nineteenth century are Napoleon and Helen Keller. Keller seemed to be more nervous than she really was because she expressed more with her hands than do most English-speaking people. One reason for this habit of gesture is that her hands were her instruments of communication they took to themselves the quick shiftings of the eye, and express some of the things that usually said about other people in a glance.

When Keller spoke, her face was animated and expressed all the modes of her thought - the expressions that make the features eloquent and give speech half its meaning. On the other hand, she did not know another's expression. When she was talking with an intimate friend, however, her hand went to her friend's face to see, as she says, "the twist of the mouth." In this way, she was able to get the meaning of those half sentences which people usually complete unconsciously from the tone of the voice or the twinkle of the eye.

Keller's memory of people was remarkable. She remembered the grasp of fingers she had held before, all the characteristic tightening of the muscles that makes one person's handshake different from that of another.

The trait most characteristic, perhaps, of Keller (and also of Anne Sullivan) was humor. Skill in the use of words and her habit of playing with them make her ready with mots and epigrams.

Helen Keller was viewed as isolated but was very in touch with the outside world. She was able to enjoy music by feeling the beat and she was able to have a strong connection with animals through touch. She was delayed at picking up language, but that did not stop her from having a voice.

Physical Characteristics: Keller was born with her senses of sight and hearing and started speaking when she was just 6 months old. She started walking at the age of 1.

Keller lost both her sight and hearing at just 19 months old. In 1882, she contracted an illness - called "brain fever" by the family doctor - that produced a high body temperature. The true nature of the illness remains a mystery today, though some experts believe it might have been scarlet fever or meningitis.

Within a few days after the fever broke, Keller's mother noticed that her daughter didn't show any reaction when the dinner bell was rung, or when a hand was waved in front of her face.

Keller suffered a series of strokes in 1961 and spent the remaining years of her life at her home in Connecticut. She died in her sleep on June 1, 1968, just a few weeks before her 88th birthday.

Quotes from others about the person

• "I feel that in this child [Keller] I have seen more of the Divine than has been manifest in anyone I ever met before." - Alexander Graham Bell
  
  "[Keller is] The greatest woman of our age." - Winston Churchill
  
  "I have been a great admirer of you [Keller] always." - Albert Einstein
  
  "The two greatest characters in the 19th century are Napoleon and Helen Keller. Napoleon tried to conquer the world by physical force and failed. Helen tried to conquer the world by power of mind - and succeeded!" - Mark Twain
  
  "I need not go into any particulars about Helen Keller. She is fellow to Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Homer, Shakespeare, and the rest of the immortals. She will be as famous a thousand years from now as she is today." - Mark Twain
  
  "[Keller is] The most wonderful being in America." - Herbert George Wells
  
  "No history of the world can be complete which does not mention Mary Helen Keller... whose overcoming of her blindness and deafness were arguably victories more important than those of Alexander the Great, because they have implications still for every living person." - Theodore Zeldin

Interests

• music (vibrations), animals

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Emanuel Swedenborg

• Politicians

  Eugene Debs

• Writers

  William Shakespeare

Connections

Given her physical challenges, Helen Keller didn't have a typical adult family life. She lived in Wrentham with John A. Macy and Anne Sullivan after the two married in 1905. Macy, an editor of Keller's biography, was a great friend to her. Helen seemed happy in this new home, and John created a system for her to take walks. However, the marriage didn't last forever. While the two never divorced, John and Anne became estranged in about 1914, and they parted ways. Keller remained with Sullivan.

However, Helen Keller almost married Peter Fagan. When Anne Sullivan became ill and had to take some time off, Peter Fagan, a 29-year-old reporter, became Helen's secretary. During this time, the two grew close and made plans to marry. However, given societal expectations for deaf and blind women at the time, Keller's family and extended family were against the match. Even so, the two planned to elope, but Peter never came. Keller said of the relationship, "His love was a bright sun that shone upon my helplessness and isolation." After the failed elopement, Helen never saw Peter again.

Father:

Arthur Henley Keller

Mother:

Catherine Everett Adams

Friend:

Mark Twain

relative:

John Adams

teacher:

Anne Sullivan

Acquaintance:

Alexander Bell

Partner:

Peter Fagan

companion:

Polly Thomson

Polly Thomson was a staple in Helen's adult life. A housekeeper from Scotland who eventually became Keller's secretary, she worked with Sullivan and Keller. Some say Sullivan, Thomson, and Keller were called the three musketeers. After Sullivan was no longer able to travel with Keller due to failing health, Thomson became Helen's best-known companion. Polly and Keller remained companions until Thomson's death in 1960.

Friend:

John Macy

References

• Helen Keller
  1989
• Who Was Helen Keller?
  2003
• The Story of Helen Keller: A Biography Book for New Readers
  2020
• Helen Keller: A Life
  1999
• A Girl Named Helen: The True Story of Helen Keller
  2018
• I am Helen Keller
  2015
• Helen Keller: Courage In The Dark
  1997
• National Geographic Readers: Helen Keller
  2017
• Miss Spitfire: Reaching Helen Keller
  2010
• Annie Sullivan and the Trials of Helen Keller
  2018
• DK Life Stories: Helen Keller
  2019