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Helen Keller – an Inspirational Woman

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Published: Aug 6, 2021

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Works Cited

  • Berger, E. (1998). Helen Keller: A Life. Penguin Books.
  • Herrmann, D. (1998). Helen Keller: A Photographic Story of a Life. DK Children.
  • Larsen, D. (2019). Helen Keller: A Biography. Routledge.
  • Keller, H. (1903). The Story of My Life. Doubleday, Page & Co.
  • Swift, H. G. (2008). The Life and Times of Helen Keller. Read Books.
  • Keller, H. (2003). The World I Live In. Dover Publications.
  • Herrmann, D. (2003). Helen Keller: Selected Writings. NYU Press.
  • Helen Keller International. (n.d.). About Helen Keller. Retrieved from https://www.hki.org/about-hki/helen-keller
  • National Women's History Museum. (n.d.). Helen Keller. Retrieved from https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/helen-keller
  • American Foundation for the Blind. (n.d.). Helen Keller: AFB and Helen Keller. Retrieved from https://www.afb.org/about-afb/history/helen-keller

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essay on helen keller

Helen Keller

Helen Keller

(1880-1968)

Who Was Helen Keller?

Helen Keller was an American educator, advocate for the blind and deaf and co-founder of the ACLU. Stricken by an illness at the age of 2, Keller was left blind and deaf. Beginning in 1887, Keller's teacher, Anne Sullivan, helped her make tremendous progress with her ability to communicate, and Keller went on to college, graduating in 1904. During her lifetime, she received many honors in recognition of her accomplishments.

Early Life and Family

The family was not particularly wealthy and earned income from their cotton plantation. Later, Arthur became the editor of a weekly local newspaper, the North Alabamian .

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.

Loss of Sight and Hearing

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.

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.

Keller's Teacher, Anne Sullivan

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.

Helen Keller with Anne Sullivan in July 1888

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.

At first, Keller was curious, then defiant, refusing to cooperate with Sullivan's instruction. When Keller did cooperate, Sullivan could tell that she wasn't making the connection between the objects and the letters spelled out in her hand. Sullivan kept working at it, forcing Keller to go through the regimen.

As Keller's frustration grew, the tantrums increased. Finally, Sullivan demanded that she and Keller be isolated from the rest of the family for a time, so that Keller could concentrate only on Sullivan's instruction. They moved to a cottage on the plantation.

In a dramatic struggle, Sullivan taught Keller the word "water"; she helped her make the connection between the object and the letters by taking Keller out to the water pump, and placing Keller's hand under the spout. While Sullivan moved the lever to flush cool water over Keller's hand, she spelled out the word w-a-t-e-r on Keller's other hand. Keller understood and repeated the word in Sullivan's hand. She then pounded the ground, demanding to know its "letter name." Sullivan followed her, spelling out the word into her hand. Keller moved to other objects with Sullivan in tow. By nightfall, she had learned 30 words.

In 1905, Sullivan married John Macy, an instructor at Harvard University, a social critic and a prominent socialist. After the marriage, Sullivan continued to be Keller's guide and mentor. When Keller went to live with the Macys, they both initially gave Keller their undivided attention. Gradually, however, Anne and John became distant to each other, as Anne's devotion to Keller continued unabated. After several years, the couple separated, though were never divorced.

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.

DOWNLOAD BIOGRAPHY'S HELEN KELLER FACT CARD

Helen Keller Fact Card

'The Story of My Life'

With the help of Sullivan and Macy, Sullivan's future husband, Keller wrote her first book, The Story of My Life . Published in 1905, the memoirs covered Keller's transformation from childhood to 21-year-old college student.

Social Activism

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).

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."

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.

'The Miracle Worker' Movie

Keller's autobiography, The Story of My Life , was used as the basis for 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.

Awards and Honors

During her lifetime, she 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 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.

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

During her remarkable life, Keller 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.

QUICK FACTS

  • Name: Helen Adams Keller
  • Birth Year: 1880
  • Birth date: June 27, 1880
  • Birth State: Alabama
  • Birth City: Tuscumbia
  • Birth Country: United States
  • Gender: Female
  • Best Known For: American educator Helen Keller overcame the adversity of being blind and deaf to become one of the 20th century's leading humanitarians, as well as co-founder of the ACLU.
  • Education and Academia
  • Astrological Sign: Cancer
  • Wright-Humason School for the Deaf
  • Radcliffe College
  • Cambridge School for Young Ladies
  • Horace Mann School for the Deaf
  • Death Year: 1968
  • Death date: June 1, 1968
  • Death State: Connecticut
  • Death City: Easton
  • Death Country: United States

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

  • Article Title: Helen Keller Biography
  • Author: Biography.com Editors
  • Website Name: The Biography.com website
  • Url: https://www.biography.com/activists/helen-keller
  • Access Date:
  • Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
  • Last Updated: May 6, 2021
  • Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
  • Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow.
  • One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.
  • Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost. Sometime, somewhere, somehow we shall find that which we seek.
  • Gradually from naming an object we advance step by step until we have traversed the vast distance between our first stammered syllable and the sweep of thought in a line of Shakespeare.
  • If it is true that the violin is the most perfect of musical instruments, then Greek is the violin of human thought.
  • A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.
  • 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)
  • The bulk of the world’s knowledge is an imaginary construction.
  • We differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and courage with which we seek wisdom beyond the senses.
  • [T]he mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!
  • It is more difficult to teach ignorance to think than to teach an intelligent blind man to see the grandeur of Niagara.
  • Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.

Suffragettes

black and white photo of harriet tubman

Susan B. Anthony

2n38fxe lucy stone 1818 1893, american abolitionist, women's suffragist and social reformer, half length portrait, sumner bradley heald, 1866

Lucretia Mott

Emmeline Pankhurst

Emmeline Pankhurst

Carrie Chapman Catt

Carrie Chapman Catt

Alice Paul

Kate Sheppard

Emily Davison

Emily Davison

portrait of evita peron

Molly Brown

Jeannette Rankin

Jeannette Rankin

Co-Founding the ACLU, Fighting for Labor Rights and Other Helen Keller Accomplishments Students Don’t Learn in School

W hile the world marked International Day of Persons with Disabilities on Dec. 3, the history of people with disabilities is still not fully taught in schools. In the U.S., if American schoolchildren learn about any person with disabilities, they learn that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt once had polio and used a wheelchair in office, and they learn about Deafblind activist Helen Keller.

Most students learn that Keller, born June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Ala., was left deaf and blind after contracting a high fever at 19 months, and that her teacher Anne Sullivan taught her braille, lip-reading, finger spelling and eventually, how to speak . Students may watch the Oscar-winning 1962 movie The Miracle Worker, which depicts these milestones as miraculous. Keller has become a worldwide symbol for children to overcome any obstacle . At the U.S. Capitol, there is even a bronze statue of 7-year-old Keller at a water pump, inspired by the movie’s depiction of a real milestone in Keller’s life in which she recognizes water coming out of the pump after Sullivan spells the word “water” into the youngster’s hand. However, there is still a great deal about her life and her accomplishments that many people don’t know.

What scholars of disability point out is that when students learn about Helen Keller, they often learn about her efforts to communicate as a child, and not about the work she did as an adult. This limited instruction has implications for how students perceive people with disabilities .

If students learn about any of Keller’s accomplishments as an adult, they learn that she became the first Deafblind graduate of Radcliffe College (now Harvard University) in 1904, and worked for American Foundation for the Blind from the mid-1920s until her death in 1968, advocating for schools for the blind and braille reading materials.

But they don’t learn that she co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920; that she was an early supporter of the NAACP, and an opponent of lynchings ; that she was an early proponent of birth control.

Sascha Cohen, who teaches American Studies at Brandeis University, and wrote the 2015 TIME article “Helen Keller’s Forgotten Radicalism” , argues that Keller’s involvement in workers’ rights can help students understand the roots of the workers’ rights and inequality issues that persist today: “The Progressive Era when she was sort of working politically in different organizations was a period of rapid industrialization and so there were these new conditions in which workers were subjected to this sort of heightened inequality and even danger and risk physically. So she pointed out that a lot of times people went blind from accidents on the shop floor. She saw this real kind of imbalance in power between the workers…and the sort of what we would call the 1% or the very few owners and managers at the top who were exploiting the workers.”

Some of the reason schools don’t teach much about Keller’s adult life is because she was involved in groups that have been perceived as too radical throughout American history. She was a member of the Socialist Party , and corresponded with Eugene Debs , the party’s most prominent member and a five-time presidential candidate . She also read Marx, and her associations with all of these far-left groups landed her on the radar of the FBI , which monitored her for ties to the Communist Party.

However, to some Black disability rights activists, like Anita Cameron, Helen Keller is not radical at all, “just another, despite disabilities, privileged white person,” and yet another example of history telling the story of privileged white Americans. Critics of Helen Keller cite her writings that reflected the popularity of now-dated eugenics theories and her friendship with one of the movement’s supporters Alexander Graham Bell . The American Foundation for the Blind archivist Helen Selsdon says Keller “moved away from that position.”

People with disabilities and activists are pushing for more education on important contributions to U.S. history by people of disabilities , such as the Capitol Crawl. On Mar. 12, 1990, Cameron and dozens of disabled people climbed up the steps of the U.S. Capitol to urge the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). It was considered a moment that raised awareness and helped get the law passed four months later, but one rarely included in public school education.

Thirty years later, one in four Americans have a disability. At least three other states have made efforts to incorporate disability history into school curricula. It’s the law in California and New Jersey to teach the contributions of people with disabilities, and Massachusetts guidelines urge state educators to do the same.

In Sep. 2018, the Texas Board of Education approved a draft of changes to state social studies standards, which included the removal of some historical figures, such as Helen Keller. Shortly after the board opened the draft for public comment, Haben Girma, a Black disability rights lawyer and the first Deafblind Harvard Law School graduate, was one of many who spoke out on the importance of teaching Helen Keller. Girma argued that if Keller’s life is not taught, students might not learn about any history-makers with disabilities. Two months later, the Texas Board of Education approved a revised draft with Keller’s name back in the standards .

Girma agrees that more should be done to teach the full life and career of Helen Keller, and encourages students to read more of her writings to learn more about who she was as an adult. Keller wrote 14 books and more than 475 speeches and essays.

“Since society only portrays Helen Keller as a little girl, a lot of people subconsciously learn to infantilize disabled adults. And I’ve been treated like a child. Many disabled adults have been treated like children,” Girma says. “That makes it difficult to get a job, to be treated with respect, to get good quality education and healthcare as an adult.”

Or just look back at what Keller herself articulated in her 1926 memoir My Key of Life about the impact of inclusive education: “The highest result of education is tolerance.”

DESCRIPTION: Image of Helen Keller holding book. GEORGINA KLEEGE: Helen Keller’s image is on the Alabama State quarter. DESCRIPTION: Image of Alabama State quarter. GEORGINA KLEEGE: It’s an image taken from a photograph of her reading a braille book. And there’s a motto that says “spirit of courage.” In some sense, that you know you have a woman reading a book DESCRIPTION: Professor Georgina Kleege speaking. GEORGINA KLEEGE: and that’s understood to represent courage. And this is not to say that Helen Keller wasn’t a courageous person DESCRIPTION: Image of a young Helen Keller. DESCRIPTION: Image of Helen Keller reading. GEORGINA KLEEGE: but it’s kind of a safe message. Without any sort of controversial overtones to it. DESCRIPTION: Image of Helen Keller typing. GEORGINA KLEEGE: It’s like Helen Keller worked hard and she got educated DESCRIPTION: Image of Helen Keller in cap and gown. GEORGINA KLEEGE: and that’s all we need to know. DESCRIPTION: Montage of images of Helen Keller throughout her life. DESCRIPTION: Montage of disability rights activists. TEXT: The History You Didn’t Learn TEXT: The Full Story of Helen Keller DESCRIPTION: Image of Helen Keller as a child. NARRATOR: Pretty much everyone learns about Helen Keller in school. From picture books to the movie The Miracle Worker . DESCRIPTION: Scene from The Miracle Worker . NARRATOR: She’s a staple in children’s education but we only DESCRIPTION: Image of water pump. NARRATOR: learn about one aspect of a multifaceted and complicated person. DESCRIPTION: Image of Helen Keller. HABEN GIRMA: The dominant story about Helen Keller is not by Helen Keller. DESCRIPTION: Disability Rights Lawyer Haben Girma speaking. HABEN GIRMA: It’s by sighted, hearing people putting forth Helen Keller’s story. DESCRIPTION: Footage of Haben Girma at the White House. NARRATOR: Haben Girma is a disability rights lawyer who is also Deafblind. DESCRIPTION: Image of Haben Girma and her dog. NARRATOR: For Girma, getting Helen Keller’s story right is personal. DESCRIPTION: Footage of Helen Keller as a child with her teacher. HABEN GIRMA: The story focuses on her being 6, 7 years old and things happening to her. People teaching her, people giving her water. She comes across as very passive but if you DESCRIPTION: Image of Helen Keller. HABEN GIRMA: learn about her life from her own words, you realize she was an agent of change. TEXT: “I do not like the world as it is; so I am trying to make it a little more as I want it.” — Helen Keller, 1912 HABEN GIRMA: She advocated for women, people of color. DESCRIPTION: Montage of images of Helen Keller throughout her life. HABEN GIRMA: Disability rights mattered to her but the dominant story doesn’t focus on that. Since society only frames her as a little girl, DESCRIPTION: Film stills from The Miracle Worker . HABEN GIRMA: a lot of people subconsciously learn to infantilize disabled adults. DESCRIPTION: Haben Girma speaking. HABEN GIRMA: That makes it difficult to get a job, to be treated with respect, to get good quality education and healthcare. DESCRIPTION: Artwork of Helen Keller and teacher. HABEN GIRMA: That’s not right. DESCRIPTION: Montage of images of Helen Keller. NARRATOR: Because we are so focused on Keller as a child, we often miss out on her long life of activism. DESCRIPTION: Sascha Cohen speaking. SASCHA COHEN: One of her passions was really the rights of workers and unionists. DESCRIPTION: Footage of 20th century cities and factories. SASCHA COHEN: The progressive era when she was working politically in different organizations was a period of rapid industrialization there were these new conditions in which workers were subjected to heightened inequality and even danger and risk physically. DESCRIPTION: Newspaper reading “Accidents Cause Many Cases Of Blindness” SASCHA COHEN: She pointed out that a lot of times people went blind from accidents on the shop floor. TEXT: will have their eyes torn by flying bits of steel DESCRIPTION: Images of factory workers. SASCHA COHEN: She saw this exploitation of employees by industrialists, factory owners, corporations. And so she became involved with the IWW, DESCRIPTION: IWW advertisement. SASCHA COHEN: the Industrial Workers of the World DESCRIPTION: Image of the Industrial Workers of the World. DESCRIPTION: Image of Helen Keller reading. SASCHA COHEN: She read Marx, she corresponded with Eugene Debs who was the major socialist at the time DESCRIPTION: Image of Eugene Debs and Ben Hanford. SASCHA COHEN: and she helped cofound the ACLU DESCRIPTION: Image of Helen Keller typing. SASCHA COHEN: which we now sort of associate with freedom of speech. She had a spirit of wanting to help the collective good, rather than individuals on their own. DESCRIPTION: Images of Helen Keller and the American Foundation for the Blind. GEORGINA KLEEGE: She found the American Foundation for the Blind, which is an advocacy and education organization. She spent her life from 1925 onward as a spokesperson, and as a fundraiser for that cause. DESCRIPTION: Helen Selsdon speaking. HELEN SELSDON: She was an early member of the NAACP. DESCRIPTION: Footage of Helen Keller. SASCHA COHEN: She’s condemned lynching. She condemns the racism perpetrated against African Americans. Many people like to think of them as opposed to racism today, it was not so typical to be opposed to racism in 1916 if you were a privileged white woman. It just wasn’t. And she was. DESCRIPTION: Montage of images of Helen Keller. HABEN GIRMA: People would often ask her, stop talking about racism, and women’s rights. Just talk about the blind and inspire us about the blind. She found that frustrating and continued to talk anyway. DESCRIPTION: Helen Keller talking in front of large crowd. DESCRIPTION: Georgina Kleege speaking. GEORGINA KLEEGE: When we talk about oppression and prejudice, disability is always sort of off to one side. But for Helen Keller, it was all of a piece. DESCRIPTION: Montage of images of Helen Keller and confidants. HABEN GIRMA: You can’t advocate for disability rights if you’re not also advocating for racial justice and gender equality. DESCRIPTION: Helen Keller receiving a pin at a ceremony. NARRATOR: Critics of Helen Keller point to one notable exception in her advocacy for people with disabilities. DESCRIPTION: Image of Helen Keller typing. NARRATOR: She was once a supporter of eugenics, a now-reviled school of thought that sought to improve human populations by breeding out certain traits, like for example certain disabilities. DESCRIPTION: Image of Helen Keller typing. HELEN SELSDON: That’s absolutely true. She did write about eugenics DESCRIPTION: Helen Selsdon speaking. HELEN SELSDON: and she was concerned that children with disabilities with severe disabilities would not be able to function in society. I think it was part of that zeitgeist at the time. I think it’s very easy to take history out of context very early on she moved away from that position. DESCRIPTION: Footage of Helen Keller typing. DESCRIPTION: Image of Helen Keller. HELEN SELSDON: And I think she would herself be heartbroken to think that she did not value every life because she absolutely did. DESCRIPTION: Helen Keller with wheelchair users. HABEN GIRMA: People need time to grow and learn. We need to forgive people when they acknowledge they’ve made mistakes. DESCRIPTION: Image of Helen Keller looking out of the window. DESCRIPTION: Image of Helen Keller at a radio station. NARRATOR: Still, Helen Keller’s prominence is another reminder of how our American history often focuses on the stories of wealthy white people. DESCRIPTION: Footage of Helen Keller at event. DESCRIPTION: Anita Cameron speaking. ANITA CAMERON: I don’t have a perspective on Helen Keller. She’s just another, despite disabilities, privileged white person. DESCRIPTION: Images of Anita Cameron demonstrating. ANITA CAMERON: I am a Black disabled Lesbian who happens to be poor. You know, you want to talk about intersectionalities and marginalizations. I’m looking up from the bottom DESCRIPTION: Images of Anita Cameron demonstrating. ANITA CAMERON: and I’m just out here trying to not only fight for the rights of all disabled but wanting to highlight even among disabled, there are those of us whose stories don’t get told. DESCRIPTION: Archival image of Anita Cameron demonstrating. NARRATOR: Anita Cameron herself was part of history in 1990 when she and several other activists from the disability rights group, ADAPT, crawled up the steps of the U.S. Capitol Building to demand the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act. DESCRIPTION: Footage of activists crawling the steps of the U.S. Capitol chanting “Access now!” DESCRIPTION: Images of ADAPT demonstration. NARRATOR: The law that now requires public buildings to have ramps and other accessibility features. DESCRIPTION: Footage of crowd at ADAPT demonstration. ANITA CAMERON: On a sunny, hot morning, we gathered up to do our crawl. And that was the only way that we could get there and we were trying to highlight the fact that people with disabilities, we live in second-class citizenship. We kind of went in stealth. It started out as a tour, and when we got into the Rotunda, we just took it over. DESCRIPTION: Demonstrators shouting “ADA now!” inside the U.S. Capitol. DESCRIPTION: Police officers approaching demonstrators. ANITA CAMERON: When it all was said and done, 104 of us were arrested. DESCRIPTION: Newspaper article reading “Officer Arrest 104 Disabled Protestors” ANITA CAMERON: I was number 81. DESCRIPTION: Images of demonstrators being arrested. ANITA CAMERON: I was in the center of a knot of people who had chained ourselves together. DESCRIPTION: Images from ADAPT protest. ANITA CAMERON: The combination of a crawl and the takeover of the rotunda is what got the ADA passed so quickly. DESCRIPTION: Image of ADA being signed into law by President George H.W. Bush. DESCRIPTION: Image of ADAPT demonstrators. NARRATOR: The fight for disability rights is far from over, but the ADA was a milestone achievement. It completely changed the way people with disabilities lived DESCRIPTION: Newspaper reading “Disabilities Act Forces Sweeping Transit Changes” NARRATOR: and recognized people with disabilities as people with civil rights. Helen Keller is certainly not the only disability rights champion we should be learning about DESCRIPTION: Montage of images of Helen Keller and disability rights activists. NARRATOR: but learning about her work and her activism more fully is a step towards understanding the contributions so many other disabled Americans have made and continue to make to our shared history. GEORGINA KLEEGE: She was born in 1880, and she died in 1968 and it was a very long life. DESCRIPTION: Footage of Helen Keller listening to music. HELEN KELLER: That was beautiful! DESCRIPTION: Montage footage of Helen Keller. GEORGINA KLEEGE: So I think when we forget about the causes that she supported it does damage to our understanding about disability. DESCRIPTION: Montage of images of Helen Keller. HABEN GIRMA: Some people have a complicated relationship with Helen Keller, because she’s been forced on us a role model to never complain, which is not true. She complained when it was the right thing to do. DESCRIPTION: Images of disability rights activists. ‘Cause sometimes when things are wrong, you have to complain to create change. DESCRIPTION: End credits.

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How Helen Keller Learned to Write

By Cynthia Ozick

An illustration of Helen Keller

Suspicion stalks fame; incredulity stalks great fame. At least three times—at the ages of eleven, twenty-three, and fifty-two—Helen Keller was assaulted by accusation, doubt, and overt disbelief. She was the butt of skeptics and the cynosure of idolaters. Mark Twain compared her to Joan of Arc, and pronounced her “fellow to Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Homer, Shakespeare and the rest of the immortals.” Her renown, he said, would endure a thousand years.

It has, so far, lasted more than a hundred, while steadily dimming. Fifty years ago, even twenty, nearly every ten-year-old knew who Helen Keller was. “The Story of My Life,” her youthful autobiography, was on the reading lists of most schools, and its author was popularly understood to be a heroine of uncommon grace and courage, a sort of worldly saint. Much of that worshipfulness has receded. No one nowadays, without intending satire, would place her alongside Caesar and Napoleon; and, in an era of earnest disabilities legislation, who would think to charge a stone-blind, stone-deaf woman with faking her experience?

Yet as a child she was accused of plagiarism, and in maturity of “verbalism”—substituting parroted words for firsthand perception. All this came about because she was at once liberated by language and in bondage to it, in a way few other human beings can fathom. The merely blind have the window of their ears, the merely deaf listen through their eyes. For Helen Keller there was no ameliorating “merely”; what she suffered was a totality of exclusion. The illness that annihilated her sight and hearing, and left her mute, has never been diagnosed. In 1882, when she was four months short of two years, medical knowledge could assert only “acute congestion of the stomach and brain,” though later speculation proposes meningitis or scarlet fever. Whatever the cause, the consequence was ferocity—tantrums, kicking, rages—but also an invented system of sixty simple signs, intimations of intelligence. The child could mimic what she could neither see nor hear: putting on a hat before a mirror, her father reading a newspaper with his glasses on. She could fold laundry and pick out her own things. Such quiet times were few. Having discovered the use of a key, she shut up her mother in a closet. She overturned her baby sister’s cradle. Her wants were physical, impatient, helpless, and nearly always belligerent.

She was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama, fifteen years after the Civil War, when Confederate consciousness was still inflamed. Her father, who had fought at Vicksburg, called himself a “gentleman farmer,” and edited a small Democratic weekly until, thanks to political influence, he was appointed a United States marshal. He was a zealous hunter who loved his guns and his dogs. Money was usually short; there were escalating marital angers. His second wife, Helen’s mother, was younger by twenty years, a spirited woman of intellect condemned to farmhouse toil. She had a strong literary side (Edward Everett Hale, the New Englander who wrote “The Man Without a Country,” was a relative) and read seriously and searchingly. In Charles Dickens’s “American Notes,” she learned about Laura Bridgman, a deaf-blind country girl who was being educated at the Perkins Institution for the Blind, in Boston. Ravaged by scarlet fever at the age of two, she was even more circumscribed than Helen Keller—she could neither smell nor taste. She was confined, Dickens said, “in a marble cell, impervious to any ray of light, or particle of sound,” lost to language beyond a handful of words unidiomatically strung together.

News of Laura Bridgman ignited hope—she had been socialized into a semblance of personhood, while Helen remained a small savage—and hope led, eventually, to Alexander Graham Bell. By then, the invention of the telephone was well behind him, and he was tenaciously committed to teaching the deaf to speak intelligibly. His wife was deaf; his mother had been deaf. When the six-year-old Helen was brought to him, he took her on his lap and instantly calmed her by letting her feel the vibrations of his pocket watch as it struck the hour. Her responsiveness did not register in her face; he described it as “chillingly empty.” But he judged her educable, and advised her father to apply to Michael Anagnos, the director of the Perkins Institution, for a teacher to be sent to Tuscumbia.

Anagnos chose Anne Mansfield Sullivan, a former student at Perkins. “Mansfield” was her own embellishment; it had the sound of gentility. If the fabricated name was intended to confer an elevated status, it was because Annie Sullivan, born into penury, had no status at all. At five, she contracted trachoma, a disease of the eye. Three years on, her mother died of tuberculosis and was buried in potter’s field—after which her father, a drunkard prone to beating his children, deserted the family. The half-blind Annie was tossed into the poorhouse at Tewksbury, Massachusetts, among syphilitic prostitutes and madmen. Decades later, recalling its “strangeness, grotesqueness and even terribleness,” Annie Sullivan wrote, “I doubt if life or for that matter eternity is long enough to erase the terrors and ugly blots scored upon my mind during those dismal years from 8 to 14.”

She was rescued from Tewksbury by a committee investigating its spreading notoriety, and was mercifully transferred to Perkins. She learned Braille and the manual alphabet—finger positions representing letters—and, at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, underwent two operations, which enabled her to read almost normally, though the condition of her eyes was fragile and inconsistent over her lifetime. After six years, she graduated from Perkins as class valedictorian. But what was to become of her? How was she to earn a living? Someone suggested that she might wash dishes or peddle needlework. “Sewing and crocheting are inventions of the devil,” she sneered. “I’d rather break stones on the king’s highway than hem a handkerchief.”

She went to Tuscumbia instead. She was twenty years old and had no experience suitable for what she would encounter in the despairs and chaotic defeats of the Keller household. The child she had come to educate threw cutlery, pinched, grabbed food off dinner plates, sent chairs tumbling, shrieked, struggled. She was strong, beautiful but for one protruding eye, unsmiling, painfully untamed: virtually her first act on meeting the new teacher was to knock out one of her front teeth. The afflictions of the marble cell had become inflictions. Annie demanded that Helen be separated from her family; her father could not bear to see his ruined little daughter disciplined. The teacher and her recalcitrant pupil retreated to a cottage on the grounds of the main house, where Annie was to be the sole authority.

What happened then and afterward she chronicled in letter after letter, to Anagnos and, more confidingly, to Mrs. Sophia Hopkins, the Perkins housemother who had given her shelter during school vacations. Mark Twain saw in Annie Sullivan a writer: “How she stands out in her letters!” he exclaimed. “Her brilliancy, penetration, originality, wisdom, character and the fine literary competencies of her pen—they are all there.” Jubilantly, she set down the progress, almost hour by hour, of an exuberant deliverance far more remarkable than Laura Bridgman’s frail and inarticulate release. Annie Sullivan’s method, insofar as she recognized it formally as a method, was pure freedom. Like any writer, she wrote and wrote and wrote, all day long: words, phrases, sentences, lines of poetry, descriptions of animals, trees, flowers, weather, skies, clouds, concepts—whatever lay before her or came usefully to mind. She wrote not on paper with a pen but with her fingers, spelling rapidly into the child’s alert palm. Mimicking unknowable configurations, Helen spelled the same letters back—but not until a connection was effected between finger-wriggling and its referent did mind break free.

This was, of course, the fabled incident at the well pump, when Helen suddenly understood that the pecking at her hand was inescapably related to the gush of cold water spilling over it. “Somehow,” the adult Helen Keller recollected, “the mystery of language was revealed to me.” In the course of a single month, from Annie’s arrival to her triumph in bridling the household despot, Helen had grown docile, affectionate, and tirelessly intent on learning from moment to moment. Her intellect was fiercely engaged, and when language began to flood it she rode on a salvational ark of words.

To Mrs. Hopkins, Annie wrote ecstatically:

Something within me tells me that I shall succeed beyond my dreams. . . . I know that [Helen] has remarkable powers, and I believe that I shall be able to develop and mould them. I cannot tell how I know these things. I had no idea a short time ago how to go to work; I was feeling about in the dark; but somehow I know now, and I know that I know. I cannot explain it; but when difficulties arise, I am not perplexed or doubtful. I know how to meet them; I seem to divine Helen’s peculiar needs. . . .
Already people are taking a deep interest in Helen. No one can see her without being impressed. She is no ordinary child, and people’s interest in her education will be no ordinary interest. Therefore let us be exceedingly careful in what we say and write about her. . . . My beautiful Helen shall not be transformed into a prodigy if I can help it.

At this time, Helen was not yet seven years old, and Annie was being paid twenty-five dollars a month.

The public scrutiny Helen Keller aroused far exceeded Annie’s predictions. It was Michael Anagnos who first proclaimed her to be a miracle child—a young goddess. “History presents no case like hers,” he exulted. “As soon as a slight crevice was opened in the outer wall of their twofold imprisonment, her mental faculties emerged full-armed from their living tomb as Pallas Athene from the head of Zeus.” And again: “She is the queen of precocious and brilliant children, Emersonian in temper, most exquisitely organized, with intellectual sight of unsurpassed sharpness and infinite reach, a true daughter of Mnemosyne.” Annie, the teacher of a flesh-and-blood child, protested: “His extravagant way of saying [these things] rubs me the wrong way. The simple facts would be so much more convincing!” But Anagnos’s glorifications caught fire: one year after Annie had begun spelling into her hand, Helen Keller was celebrated in newspapers all over America and Europe. When her dog was inadvertently shot, an avalanche of contributions poured in to replace it; unprompted, she directed that the money be set aside for the care of an impoverished deaf-blind boy at Perkins. At eight, she was taken to visit President Cleveland at the White House, and in Boston was introduced to many of the luminaries of the period: Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier, Edward Everett Hale, and Bishop Phillips Brooks (who addressed her puzzlement over the nature of God). At nine, she wrote to Whittier, saluting him as “Dear Poet”:

I thought you would be glad to hear that your beautiful poems make me very happy. Yesterday I read “In School Days” and “My Playmate,” and I enjoyed them greatly. . . . It is very pleasant to live here in our beautiful world. I cannot see the lovely things with my eyes, but my mind can see them all, and so I am joyful all the day long.
When I walk out in my garden I cannot see the beautiful flowers, but I know that they are all around me; for is not the air sweet with their fragrance? I know too that the tiny lily-bells are whispering pretty secrets to their companions else they would not look so happy. I love you very dearly, because you have taught me so many lovely things about flowers and birds, and people.

Her dependence on Annie for the assimilation of her immediate surroundings was nearly total, but through the raised letters of Braille she could be altogether untethered: books coursed through her. In childhood, she was captivated by “Little Lord Fauntleroy,” Frances Hodgson Burnett’s story of a sunnily virtuous boy who melts a crusty old man’s heart; it became a secret template of her own character as she hoped she might always manifest it—not sentimentally but in full awareness of dread. She was not deaf to Caliban’s wounded cry: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse.” Helen Keller’s profit was that she knew how to rejoice. In young adulthood, she seized on Swedenborgian spiritualism. Annie had kept away from teaching any religion at all: she was a down-to-earth agnostic whom Tewksbury had cured of easy belief. When Helen’s responsiveness to bitter social deprivation later took on a worldly strength, leading her to socialism, and even to unpopular Bolshevik sympathies, Annie would have no part of it, and worried that Helen had gone too far. Marx was not in Annie’s canon. Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, and Milton were: she had Helen reading “Paradise Lost” at twelve.

But Helen’s formal schooling was widening beyond Annie’s tutelage. With her teacher at her side—and the financial support of such patrons as John Spaulding, the Sugar King, and Henry Rogers, of Standard Oil—Helen spent a year at Perkins, and then entered the Wright-Humason School, in New York, a fashionable academy for deaf girls; she was its single deaf-blind pupil. She was also determined to learn to speak like other people, but her efforts could not be readily understood. Speech was not her only ambition: she intended to go to college. To prepare, she enrolled in the Cambridge School for Young Ladies, where she studied mathematics, German, French, Latin, and Greek and Roman history. In 1900, she was admitted to Radcliffe (then an “annex” to Harvard), still with Annie in attendance. Despite Annie’s presence in every class, diligently spelling the lecture into Helen’s hand, and wearing out her troubled eyes as she transcribed text after text into the manual alphabet, no one thought of granting her a degree along with Helen: the radiant miracle outshone the driven miracle worker. It was not uncommon for Annie Sullivan to play second fiddle to Helen Keller, or to be charged with being Helen’s jailer, or harrier, or ventriloquist. During examinations at Radcliffe, Annie was not permitted to be in the building. Otherwise, Helen relied on her own extraordinary memory and on Annie’s lightning fingers. Luckily, a second helper soon turned up: he was John Macy, a twenty-five-year-old English instructor at Harvard, a writer and editor, a fervent socialist, and, eventually, Annie Sullivan’s husband, eleven years her junior.

At Radcliffe, Helen became a writer. Charles Townsend Copeland—Harvard’s illustrious Copey, a professor of rhetoric—had encouraged her (as she put it to him in a grateful letter) “to make my own observations and describe the experiences peculiarly my own. Henceforth I am resolved to be myself, to live my own life and write my own thoughts.” Out of this came “The Story of My Life,” the autobiography of a twenty-one-year-old, published while she was still an undergraduate. It began as a series of sketches for the Ladies ’ Home Journal; the fee was three thousand dollars. John Macy described the laborious process:

When she began work at her story, more than a year ago, she set up on the Braille machine about a hundred pages of what she called “material,” consisting of detached episodes and notes put down as they came to her without definite order or coherent plan. . . . Then came the task where one who has eyes to see must help her. Miss Sullivan and I read the disconnected passages, put them into chronological order, and counted the words to be sure the articles should be the right length. All this work we did with Miss Keller beside us, referring everything, especially matters of phrasing, to her for revision. . . .
Her memory of what she had written was astonishing. She remembered whole passages, some of which she had not seen for many weeks, and could tell, before Miss Sullivan had spelled into her hand a half-dozen words of the paragraphs under discussion, where they belonged and what sentences were necessary to make the connections clear.

This method of collaboration continued throughout Helen Keller’s professional writing life; yet within these constraints the design and the sensibility were her own. She was a self-conscious stylist. Macy remarked that she had the courage of her metaphors—he meant that she sometimes let them carry her away—and Helen herself worried that her prose could now and then seem “periwigged.” To the contemporary ear, there is too much Victorian lace and striving uplift in her cadences; but the contemporary ear is scarcely entitled, simply by being contemporary, to set itself up as judge—every period is marked by a prevailing voice. Helen Keller’s earnestness is a kind of piety. It is as if Tennyson and the transcendentalists had together got hold of her typewriter. At the same time, she is embroiled in the whole range of human perplexity—except, tellingly, for irony. She has no “edge,” and why should she? Irony is a radar that seeks out the dark side; she had darkness enough. She rarely knew what part of her mind was instinct and what part was information, and she was cautious about the difference. “It is certain,” she wrote, “that I cannot always distinguish my own thoughts from those I read, because what I read becomes the very substance and texture of my mind. . . . It seems to me that the great difficulty of writing is to make the language of the educated mind express our confused ideas, half feelings, half thoughts, where we are little more than bundles of instinctive tendencies.” She who had once been incarcerated in the id did not require Freud to instruct her in its inchoate presence.

“The Story of My Life,” first published in 1903, is being honored in its centenary year by two new reissues, one from the Modern Library, edited and with a preface by James Berger, and the other from W. W. Norton, edited by Roger Shattuck with Dorothy Herrmann; Shattuck also supplies a thoughtful foreword and afterword. Much else accompanies the Keller text: Macy’s ample contribution to the original edition, as well as Annie’s indelible reports and Helen’s increasingly impressive letters from childhood on. All these elements together make up at least a partial biography, though they do not take us into Helen Keller’s astonishing future as world traveller and energetic advocate for the blind. (Two full biographies, “Helen Keller: A Life,” by Dorothy Herrmann, and “Helen and Teacher,” by Joseph P. Lash, flesh out her long and active life.) Macy was able to write about Helen nearly as authoritatively as Annie, but also (in private) more skeptically: after his marriage, the three of them, a feverishly literary crew, set up housekeeping in rural Wrentham, Massachusetts. Macy soon discovered that he had married not just a woman, and a moody one at that, but the infrastructure of a public institution. As Helen’s secondary amanuensis, he continued to be of use until the marriage foundered—on his profligacy with money, on Annie’s irritability (she scorned his uncompromising socialism), and, finally, on his accelerating alcoholism.

Because Macy was known to have assisted Helen in the preparation of “The Story of My Life,” the insinuations of control that often assailed Annie landed on him. Helen’s ideas, it was suggested, were really Macy’s; he had transformed her into a “Marxist propagandist.” It was true that she sympathized with his political bent, but she had arrived at her views independently. The charge of expropriation, of both thought and idiom, was old, and dogged her at intervals during her early and middle years: she was a fraud, a puppet, a plagiarist. She was false coin. She was “a living lie.”

Helen Keller was eleven when these words were first hurled at her by an infuriated Michael Anagnos. What brought on this defection was a little story she had written, called “The Frost King,” which she sent him as a birthday present. In the voice of a highly literary children’s narrative, it recounts how the “frost fairies” cause the season’s turning:

When the children saw the trees all aglow with brilliant colors they clapped their hands and shouted for joy, and immediately began to pick great bunches to take home. “The leaves are as lovely as the flowers!” cried they, in their delight.

Anagnos—doubtless clapping his hands and shouting for joy—immediately began to publicize Helen’s newest accomplishment. “The Frost King” appeared both in the Perkins alumni magazine and in another journal for the blind, which, following Anagnos, unhesitatingly named it “without parallel in the history of literature.” But more than a parallel was at stake; the story was found to be nearly identical to “The Frost Fairies,” by Margaret Canby, a writer of children’s books. Anagnos was humiliated, and fled headlong from adulation to excoriation. Feeling personally betrayed and institutionally discredited, he arranged an inquisition for the terrified Helen, standing her alone in a room before a jury of eight Perkins officials and himself, all mercilessly cross-examining her. Her mature recollection of Anagnos’s “court of investigation” registers as pitiably as the ordeal itself:

Mr. Anagnos, who loved me tenderly, thinking that he had been deceived, turned a deaf ear to the pleadings of love and innocence. He believed, or at least suspected, that Miss Sullivan and I had deliberately stolen the bright thoughts of another and imposed them on him to win his admiration. . . . As I lay in my bed that night, I wept as I hope few children have wept. I felt so cold, I imagined I should die before morning, and the thought comforted me. I think if this sorrow had come to me when I was older, it would have broken my spirit beyond repairing.

She was defended by Alexander Graham Bell, and by Mark Twain, who parodied the whole procedure with a thumping hurrah for plagiarism, and disgust for the egotism of “these solemn donkeys breaking a little child’s heart with their ignorant damned rubbish! . . . A gang of dull and hoary pirates piously setting themselves the task of disciplining and purifying a kitten that they think they’ve caught filching a chop!” Margaret Canby’s tale had been spelled to Helen perhaps three years before, and lay dormant in her prodigiously retentive memory; she was entirely oblivious of reproducing phrases not her own. The scandal Anagnos had precipitated left a lasting bruise. But it was also the beginning of a psychological, even a metaphysical, clarification that Helen refined and ratified as she grew older, when similar, if subtler, suspicions cropped up in the press. “The Story of My Life” was attacked in The Nation not for plagiarism in the usual sense but for the purloining of “things beyond her powers of perception with the assurance of one who has verified every word. . . . One resents the pages of second-hand description of natural objects.” The reviewer blamed her for the sin of vicariousness. “All her knowledge,” he insisted, “is hearsay knowledge.”

It was almost a reprise of the Perkins tribunal: she was again being confronted with the charge of inauthenticity. Anagnos’s rebuke—“Helen Keller is a living lie”—regularly resurfaced, in the form of a neurologist’s or a psychologist’s assessment, or in the reservations of reviewers. A French professor of literature, who was himself blind, determined that she was “a dupe of words, and her aesthetic enjoyment of most of the arts is a matter of auto-suggestion rather than perception.” A New Yorker interviewer complained, “She talks bookishly. . . . To express her ideas, she falls back on the phrases she has learned from books, and uses words that sound stilted, poetical metaphors.”

But the cruellest appraisal of all came, in 1933, from Thomas Cutsforth, a blind psychologist. By this time, Helen was fifty-two, and had published four additional autobiographical volumes. Cutsforth disparaged everything she had become. The wordless child she once was, he maintained, was closer to reality than what her teacher had made of her through the imposition of “word-mindedness.” He objected to her use of images such as “a mist of green,” “blue pools of dog violets,” “soft clouds tumbling.” All that, he protested, was “implied chicanery” and “a birthright sold for a mess of verbiage.” He criticized

the aims of the educational system in which [Helen Keller] has been confined during her whole life. Literary expression has been the goal of her formal education. Fine writing, regardless of its meaningful content, has been the end toward which both she and her teacher have striven. . . . Her own experiential life was rapidly made secondary, and it was regarded as such by the victim. . . . Her teacher’s ideals became her ideals, her teacher’s likes became her likes, and whatever emotional activity her teacher experienced she experienced.

For Cutsforth—and not only for him—she was the victim of language rather than its victorious master. She was no better than a copy; whatever was primary, and thereby genuine, had been stamped out. As for Annie, while here she was pilloried as her pupil’s victimizer, elsewhere she was pitied as a woman cheated of her own life by having sacrificed it to serve another. Either Helen was Annie’s slave or Annie was Helen’s.

Helen knew what she saw. Once, having been taken to the uppermost viewing platform of what was then the tallest building in the world, she defined her condition:

I will concede that my guides saw a thousand things that escaped me from the top of the Empire State Building, but I am not envious. For imagination creates distances that reach to the end of the world. . . . There was the Hudson—more like the flash of a swordblade than a noble river. The little island of Manhattan, set like a jewel in its nest of rainbow waters, stared up into my face, and the solar system circled about my head!

Her rebuttal to word-mindedness, to vicariousness, to implied chicanery and the living lie, was inscribed deliberately and defiantly in her images of “swordblade” and “rainbow waters.” The deaf-blind person, she wrote, “seizes every word of sight and hearing, because his sensations compel it. Light and color, of which he has no tactual evidence, he studies fearlessly, believing that all humanly knowable truth is open to him.” She was not ashamed of talking bookishly: it meant a ready access to the storehouse of history and literature. She disposed of her critics with a dazzling apothegm—“The bulk of the world’s knowledge is an imaginary construction”—and went on to contend that history itself “is but a mode of imagining, of making us see civilizations that no longer appear upon the earth.” Those who ridiculed her rendering of color she dismissed as “spirit-vandals” who would force her “to bite the dust of material things.” Her idea of the subjective onlooker was broader than that of physics, and while “red” may denote an explicit and measurable wavelength in the visible spectrum, in the mind it varies from the bluster of rage to the reticence of a blush: physics cannot cage metaphor.

She saw, then, what she wished, or was blessed, to see, and rightly named it imagination. In this she belongs to a broader class than that narrow order of the deaf-blind. Her class, her tribe, hears what no healthy ear can catch and sees what no eye chart can quantify. Her common language was not with the man who crushed a child for memorizing what the fairies do, or with the carpers who scolded her for the crime of a literary vocabulary. She was a member of the race of poets, the Romantic kind; she was close cousin to those novelists who write not only what they do not know but what they cannot possibly know.

And though she was early taken in hand by a writerly intelligence, it was hardly in the power of the manual alphabet to pry out a writer who was not already there. Laura Bridgman stuck to her lacemaking, and with all her senses intact might have remained a needlewoman. John Macy believed finally that between Helen and Annie there was only one genius—his wife. In the absence of Annie’s inventiveness and direction, he implied, Helen’s efforts would show up as the lesser gifts they were. This did not happen. Annie died, at seventy, in 1936, four years after Macy; they had long been estranged. Depressed, obese, cranky, and inconsolable, she had herself gone blind. Helen came under the care of her secretary, Polly Thomson, a loyal but unliterary Scotswoman: the scenes she spelled into Helen’s hand never matched Annie’s quicksilver evocations.

Even as Helen mourned the loss of her teacher, she flourished. With the assistance of Nella Henney, Annie Sullivan’s biographer, she continued to publish journals and memoirs. She undertook gruelling visits to Japan, India, Israel, Europe, Australia, everywhere championing the disabled and the dispossessed. She was indefatigable until her very last years, and died in 1968, weeks before her eighty-eighth birthday.

Yet the story of her life is not the good she did, the panegyrics she inspired, or the disputes (genuine or counterfeit? victim or victimizer?) that stormed around her. The most persuasive story of Helen Keller’s life is what she said it was: “I observe, I feel, I think, I imagine.” She was an artist. She imagined.

“Blindness has no limiting effect upon mental vision,” she argued again and again. “My intellectual horizon is infinitely wide. The universe it encircles is immeasurable.” And, like any writer making imagination’s mysterious claims before the material-minded, she had cause to cry out, “Oh, the supercilious doubters!”

Nevertheless, she was a warrior in a vaster and more vexing conflict. Do we know only what we see, or do we see what we somehow already know? Are we more than the sum of our senses? Does a picture—whatever strikes the retina—engender thought, or does thought create the picture? Can there be subjectivity without an object to glance off? Theorists have their differing notions, to which the ungraspable organism that is Helen Keller is a retort. She is not an advocate for one side or the other in the ancient debate concerning the nature of the real. She is not a philosophical or neurological or therapeutic topic. She stands for enigma; there lurks in her still the angry child who demanded to be understood yet could not be deciphered. She refutes those who cannot perceive, or do not care to value, what is hidden from sensation: collective memory, heritage, literature.

Helen Keller’s lot, it turns out, was not unique. “We work in the dark,” Henry James affirmed, on behalf of his own art; and so did she. It was the same dark. She knew her Wordsworth: “Visionary power / Attends the motions of the viewless winds, / Embodied in the mystery of words: / There, darkness makes abode.” She vivified Keats’s phantom theme of negative capability, the poet’s oarless casting about for the hallucinatory shadows of desire. She fought the debunkers who, for the sake of a spurious honesty, would denude her of landscape and return her to the marble cell. She fought the literalists who took imagination for mendacity, who meant to disinherit her, and everyone, of poetry. Her legacy, after all, is an epistemological marker of sorts: proof of the real existence of the mind’s eye.

In one respect, though, she was as fraudulent as the cynics charged. She had always been photographed in profile; this hid her disfigured left eye. In maturity, she had both eyes surgically removed and replaced with glass—an expedient known only to her intimates. Everywhere she went, her sparkling blue prosthetic eyes were admired for their living beauty and humane depth. ♦

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A Memoirist Who Told Everything and Repented Nothing

By Hillary Kelly

Briefly Noted

By Emily Ziff Griffin

The Story of My Life

By helen keller.

  • The Story of My Life Summary

Helen Keller was born on June 27, 1880 in the small town of Tuscumbia, Alabama. When she was a year old, she was stricken with an illness that left her without sight or hearing. In the early years after her illness, it was difficult for her to communicate, even with her family; she lived her life entirely in the dark, often angry and frustrated with the fact that no one could understand her. Everything changed in March of 1887, when Helen's teacher, Anne Sullivan , came to live with the family in Alabama and turned Helen's world around.

Miss Sullivan taught Helen the names of objects by giving them to her and then spelling out the letters of their name in her hand. Helen learned to spell these words through imitation, without understanding what she was doing, but eventually had a breakthrough and realized that everything had a name, and that Miss Sullivan was teaching them to her. From this point on, Helen acquired language rapidly; she particularly enjoyed learning out in nature, where she and her teacher would take walks and she would ask questions about her surroundings. Soon after this, Helen learned how to read; Miss Sullivan taught her this by giving her strips of cardboard with raised letters on them, and then having her act out the sentence with objects. Soon, Helen could read entire books.

In May 1888, Helen went north to visit Boston with her mother and teacher. She spent some time studying at the Perkins Institute for the Blind, and quickly befriended the other blind girls who were her age. They spent a vacation at Brewster in Cape Cod, where Helen experienced the ocean for the first time. Following this, they spent nearly every winter up north.

Once she had learned to read, Helen was determined next to learn how to speak. Her teacher and many others believed it would be impossible for her to ever speak normally, but she resolved to reach that point. Miss Sullivan took her to the Horace Mann School in 1890 to begin learning with Miss Sarah Fuller , and Helen learned by feeling the position of Miss Fuller's lips and tongue when she spoke. The moment she spoke her first words, "It is warm," was a powerful memory for her: she was thrilled that she might be able to speak to her family and friends at last.

The winter of 1892 was a troubling time for Helen. Seemingly inspired by the beautiful fall foliage around her, she wrote a story called "The Frost King," and sent it up to her teacher at the Perkins Institute as a gift. It soon came out that Helen's story was quite like another in a published book, called "The Frost Fairies." Helen had been read the original story as a child, and the words had remained so ingrained in her mind that she'd unwittingly plagiarized them when she wrote her own story. This tainted Helen's relationship with her Perkins Institute teacher, Mr. Anagnos , and made her distrust her own mind and the originality of her thoughts for a long time.

In 1894 Helen attended the Wright-Humanson School for the Deaf in New York City, and began studying formal subjects like history, Latin, French, German, and arithmetic. In 1896, she began her studies at the Cambridge School for Young Ladies in Massachusetts, which would prepare her to eventually attend Radcliffe College, the women's college affiliated with Harvard University. This was her first time attending school with girls who could see or hear, rather than other students who were also deaf or blind. Though it was a challenge, she persevered; however, her mother eventually withdrew her from the Cambridge School to finish her Radcliffe preparation with a private tutor, because they did not agree with the Cambridge School principal's wish to lighten Helen's course load. She successfully qualified for Radcliffe in 1899, and entered college in the fall of 1900. Though college presented unique obstacles for Helen to overcome, she deeply appreciated her opportunity to attend.

Helen uses the final chapters of her memoir to discuss certain things that are particularly important to her, like her love of books, her favorite pastimes, and the friends she made who shaped her life. Two additional sections of the autobiography include Helen's personal letters written throughout her youth, as well as supplementary commentary by her editor, with a first-hand account by Helen's teacher, Anne Sullivan.

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The Story of My Life Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Story of My Life is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

The Story of My Life by Helen Keller

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What was the singular coincidence that the narrator talks about?

One of Helen Keller's ancestors was a teacher of the deaf and wrote a book on the education of the deaf, a coincidence, as Helen was both blind and deaf. The family on my father's side is descended from Caspar Keller, a native of Switzerland, who...

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Study Guide for The Story of My Life

The Story of My Life study guide contains a biography of Helen Keller, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

  • About The Story of My Life
  • Character List

Lesson Plan for The Story of My Life

  • About the Author
  • Study Objectives
  • Common Core Standards
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Optimism: An Essay by Helen Keller

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Guest Essay

Helen Keller and the Problem of ‘Inspiration Porn’

essay on helen keller

By M. Leona Godin

Dr. Godin is a writer, performer and educator and the author of “There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness.”

Like many disabled people who grew up in the decades after Helen Keller’s death in 1968, I had always found the mythology of her life story troubling. The narrative that depicted Keller — arguably the most famous disabled person in 20th-century America — as a sort of deaf-blind angel did not resonate with me.

I’d later come to see Keller’s mainstream image and story as a textbook example of “ inspiration porn ,” where disabled people’s lives are flattened into saccharine narratives about overcoming adversity, usually designed to make nondisabled people feel uplifted and grateful. The enormous success of the 1962 film “The Miracle Worker , ” which reduces Keller’s long life to the iconic water-pump scene in which 7-year-old Keller begins to communicate, had much to do with that mythology. I’ve always been attracted to the dark and edgy cultural underbelly, and Helen Keller’s story struck me as too wholesome and precious.

So I was curious when I came upon a book titled “The Radical Lives of Helen Keller,” by the women’s studies scholar Kim E. Nielsen, 15 years ago . I was a graduate student at New York University, but I was faltering in my studies at the time, and, uncertain that I was cut out for academia, I had begun moonlighting as a performance artist. I was also slowly going blind and struggling to make my way in the world.

In “The Radical Lives of Helen Keller” I found a new sort of narrative, and it was a revelation. I learned about Keller’s expansive and often controversial work to promote human rights — for women, for workers, for people of color. I learned that in her long life (1880-1968) she was a socialist, a suffragist and a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union. And of special interest to me as an artist, I learned that Keller and her teacher, Anne Sullivan, performed on the vaudeville circuit from 1920 to 1924. I would take that delicious tidbit — which some of her friends called a “deplorable theatrical exhibition”— and spin it into a one-woman show, “The Star of Happiness,” a move that shifted the direction of my life into the arts.

I created a piece that aimed to both celebrate and complicate Keller’s life story and that highlighted her frustrations at being asked to retell the same events of the “miracle” of education over and over. The term “inspiration porn” did not exist in her day, but she still managed to dismantle it by infusing her radical political views into her act. Channeling Keller made it clear to me that although she often put forth an uplifting message, she did not shy away from challenging her simplified public image and the assumptions held by the audiences who came to see her.

Helen Keller is back in the spotlight this week. On Tuesday, PBS premiered “Becoming Helen Keller,” an accessible, audio-described documentary that examines her whole dynamic and influential life, from radical leftist politics to thwarted love affair to travels around the world as an unofficial American ambassador after World War II. And, importantly, it does so while prominently featuring a cast of accomplished blind, deaf and deaf-blind scholars and artists as expert commentators, some of whom have moved past the too-good-to-be-true narrative of Keller’s life. “The story of the overcoming, saintly figure,” the blind author Georgina Kleege says, “I wish we could retire that.”

We’ve come a long way since “The Miracle Worker.” At some point, though, I found myself wondering why Keller is having yet another cultural moment. Why is it that America can’t seem to quit its infatuation with Keller? The blind, deaf and deaf-blind experiences are diverse; we have so many stories to tell. Yet we seem to fall back to Keller as a kind of shorthand for the disabled experience, as if there were just one. How can we move our understanding of disability forward by telling and retelling the story of this one amazing but decades-gone figure? Today’s disabled artists, writers and activists are responding to a world entirely changed since Keller gave her last speech in 1961. Yet, with some exceptions, our mainstream conversations about disability have stagnated.

I doubt that Keller, with her distinctly progressive leanings, would want us to remain with her in the mid-20th century. She might even be alarmed and a bit embarrassed to learn that we are still looking back at her instead of marching forward with the movements she helped build. As someone deeply involved with the unfolding social issues of her day, she would, I believe, prefer us to mark the astounding changes that have occurred: the Americans With Disabilities Act; the possibilities for accessibility that have come with the digital age; the flourishing of voices among disabled scholars, activists, artists, scientists and so many others. These changes seem to be barely recognized by our own mainstream culture today, in which honest and complex representations of disabled people are still rare and inspiration porn is still the norm.

The extremes of disabled representation that we usually find in mainstream media — superhuman disabled people on the one hand, pitiful creatures in need of a cure on the other — are created, almost exclusively, by nondisabled people for nondisabled people. This perhaps explains why they are so redundant and out of touch with our experience. It would be laughable if those images did not translate directly into discrimination in the workplace, in the medical establishment, in our creative institutions. I and other blind writers experience this in both obvious and subtle ways. For instance, we often hear from editors and other decision makers, “Oh, we like this work, but we just published a blind author.” Culturally speaking, it reinforces the idea that we can have only one blind person at a time in the room.

My fellow writers are those I know best, but there’s a growing community of disabled artists, thinkers, performers and creators, some of whom Keller may have applauded, others perhaps not. We don’t all have to agree; the numbers and variety are what’s important in order to crumble the monoliths that serve mostly to keep a majority of disabled people from flourishing. We gain strength in those numbers.

In my own journey of becoming a published author, I’ve had a lot of help from my fellow blind writers, such as Jim Knipfel , the first contemporary blind voice I’d ever read and whose New York Press column, “ Slackjaw, ” showed me that we could be funny and irreverent; and contemporaries like James Tate Hill , whose new memoir, “ Blind Man’s Bluff ,” tells the story of central vision loss, dismantling the strict binary of sight and blindness. They’ve helped me negotiate the writing process and publishing industry in ways that sighted writers never could have.

Other writers are expanding disability culture in new and exciting ways. Elsa Sjunneson is a deaf-blind writer and editor whose forthcoming book, “ Being Seen ,” is a radical takedown of ableism, demanding that the nondisabled world adapt and change around the disabled body. John Lee Clark is a deaf-blind poet, essayist and Protactile educator with two books forthcoming. Protactile is a touch-based communication system developed by and for the deaf-blind community. Mr. Clark is the most well-connected person I know, with a deaf-blind network that is not just national but also global. He has helped me to think about the flip side of accessibility and inclusion — the dangers and frustrations inherent in always clamoring to be let into the mainstream and the importance of creating our own culture based on the senses we enjoy. If we truly want more diversity in the stories we tell, then perhaps we need to make room for different ways of telling them.

So yes, let’s take a moment to celebrate Helen Keller, and then let’s imagine what it might mean to be like her, to do what she would do now — to work hard to communicate with all kinds of people, to fight for the rights of others as well as ourselves and to realize that acceptance and inclusion are ever-evolving things made possible by choice and determination, not by miracles.

M. Leona Godin is a writer, performer and educator and the author of “ There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness .” She has taught literature and humanities courses at New York University and has lectured on art, accessibility, technology and disability across the country. Her online magazine Aromatica Poetica explores the arts and sciences of smell and taste.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram .

Helen Keller: The Most Important Day Essay

Helen Keller’s story is that of a person who at the age of only two became deaf, dumb and blind due to an illness and got completely isolated from the world. She was considered unintelligent by all and thus, had to live in a completely hopeless and dark world all by herself. Just before she turned 7 she met her teacher Anne Sullivan who helped her fight a slow and hard battle for reentering into the world. Helen Keller finally succeeded against all odds and it is her meeting with her teacher which she considers as “the most important day” of her entire life. The reason she does so is because it was only after meeting her teacher that Helen’s real life began. Anne Sullivan helped transform Helen from a wild and savage child to an extremely responsible one by teaching her how to connect everyday objects with English alphabets. She gave meaning to the mere signals, which Helen used to make herself understood, inside her mind.

Even the movie made on Helen Keller, The Miracle Worker , dedicates a part to “the most important day” of Helen’s life when she learns her very first word, water. Anne desperately tries to make Helen understand the work by signing it on her hand and suddenly Helen realizes what Anne is trying to tell her. She even tries to say her first word but only manages to say “Wah. Wah.” but herself continues to sign the word over and over again. Once Helen discovered the beautiful mystery behind languages there was no stopping her. Anne taught her to first spell out the letters on her hand and then to correlate the words with their meanings. Helen’s persistence and determination brought forth her emotional and intellectual capabilities. She had a passion for learning and this helped her rise above others clearing any social obstacle in her way to emerge as the first deaf and blind person to finish her graduation from college. Anne stayed by Helen’s side for almost her entire lifetime. She helped Helen when she was in college by laboriously spelling out her lectures and books onto her hand so that she could understand them.

Anne was single handedly responsible for turning Helen’s life completely around and her entry into Helen’s life has been described by Helen as “the most important day” of her entire life. Helen says that Anne took care of her as if she were her mother and revealed to her all the wonderful and marvelous things in life, but above all she realized the meaning of selfless love. Slowly, helpless and inarticulate Helen grew from being simply a blind, deaf and dumb girl into a highly sensitive and intelligent one who could speak and write with ease. But, Helen did not stop there and all through her life continued her learning process. When she became an adult she traveled all over the world campaigning for women’s rights, world peace, civil rights and human dignity, and laboring persistently for the progress and devilment of others. She became a prominent figure in the world authoring many essays and books, thus attracting not only awe and admiration but also inspiration and respect. When she died she became a characterization of victory over hardships of life and reserved a distinctive place for herself in our history forever.

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Optimism: An Essay

Helen keller.

29 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1903

About the author

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In her lovingly crafted and deeply perceptive autobiography, Keller's joyous spirit is most vividly expressed in her connection to nature:

Indeed, everything that could hum, or buzz, or sing, or bloom, had a part in my education.... Few know what joy it is to feel the roses pressing softly into the hand, or the beautiful motion of the lilies as they sway in the morning breeze. Sometimes I caught an insect in the flower I was plucking, and I felt the faint noise of a pair of wings rubbed together in a sudden terror....

The idea of feeling rather than hearing a sound, or of admiring a flower's motion rather than its color, evokes a strong visceral sensation in the reader, giving The Story of My Life a subtle power and beauty. Keller's celebration of discovery becomes our own. In the end, this blind and deaf woman succeeds in sharpening our eyes and ears to the beauty of the world. --Shawn Carkonen

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Helen Keller Essay

Helen Keller Helen Keller was an American author who lived to educate and inspire others to become the most unique author of her time. She was a gifted woman who had exceptional writing abilities. She utilized simplistic style to correspond with all varieties of people. She wrote to inspire people and to help disabled people achieve their goals. Her writing style was full of many types of diction, syntactic devices, and patterns of imagery to exemplify her life chronicle. Keller used an unadorned tone with superb expressions and descriptions. Helen Adams Keller was born in the small town of Tuscumbia, Alabama in 1880. When she was nineteen months old she was diagnosed with scarlet fever, which left her blind and deaf for the …show more content…

Her main advantage in becoming successful was her eagerness to learn. When she first started to learn she says, “I began my studies with eagerness. Before me I saw a new world opening in beauty and light, and I felt within me the capacity to know all things.” (Keller, pg. 72) She had a positive persona that enabled her to learn. She wrote simple but effectively in order to appeal to ordinary people, like she saw herself. Keller used simple sentences to convey her thoughts. “I felt approaching footsteps…” (Keller, pg. 15) she writes simple to easily explain her situations. Keller’s main message in her autobiography is that you can persevere through anything in life, “Helen Keller has shown the world that one can achieve anything in their lifetime.” ( , Pg. 210) She tells the story of her life to present the examples in her life and to show her own uniqueness. Keller proved that her deafness and blindness would not stop her from being an extraordinary person. She also wrote to express her survival of her disabilities and how she overcame them. Keller’s purpose was to inspire people to endure. She communicated to disabled people especially to help them realize what they are capable of. Helen Keller uses specific diction techniques in her writing to address her ideas. She uses vivid sensory language when describing events and objects. When she went to visit the ocean she says, “I felt the pebbles rattling as the waves

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Selfishness In Chrysanthem, By Ayn Rand

In order for someone to achieve success they must do whatever is necessary. Her arrogance and selfishness are the reasons which led her to success and achieving her goals. She said that “no one’s happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy”. She encouraged others to worry about their needs and ignore the needs of others.

Anne Sullivan Research Paper

On April 14, 1866 Anne Sullivan was born in Feeding Hills, Massachusetts. Anne Sullivan helped blind and deaf Helen Keller how to communicate. Anne Sullivan's parents had five children, but two of them died in their infancy. Anne Sullivan and her two siblings grew up in poor conditions. When Anne was five she found out that she had an eye disease called trachoma, which damaged her eyesight incredibly. Anne's mother Alice, suffered from tuberculosis and she had a difficult time getting places after her mom suffered from a fall. Anne's mother died when she was only eight years old. At a young age Anne still had a strong personality. Annes abusive brother Thomas abandoned the family. Anne and her younger brother Jimmie were sent to a house for the poor.

The Gifts Of Imperfections Summary

She started to analyze the information she had from her study and found that those who were living wholehearted lives were not always the most successful in life. Those people were not accomplishing more or satisfying more than others. They were simply who they are. They trusted that they were worthy of compliments and love even though they were not always successful and did not have all the things we think of in regards to successful

Helen Keller Play: Script

On June 27, 1880, a girl named  Helen Adams Keller, a very well-knowned writer, was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama,   in a white, frame cottage called “Ivy Green.” Her parents were captain Arthur Henley Keller and Kate Adams Keller.

Helen Keller Research Paper

Helen Keller created hope for lots of people who had a disability of some sort and showed them that you do not have to be held back just because of that disability. Like how Anne Sullivan kept trying with Helen to help her understand, even though after multiple attempts, she didn't. After lots of determination, Helen finally understood. Then after that it felt as if nothing could stop her and she began

Helen Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama. When Helen was born she had both her hearing and her sight, but at the age of about nineteen months she lost both. (History.com). There wasn’t any medicine or real studies to some diseases, so nobody knew what the cause of her blindness and deafness was. Today, people believe that her illness is an effect

Helen Keller was born on June 27, 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Her parents were Katherine Adams Keller and Arthur H. Keller, who proudly served in the Civil War. The family owned a cotton plantation, and in his later years Arthur wrote a weekly newspaper called the North Alabamian (biography.com, Internet).

Helen Keller was the first daughter of Arthur Keller and Kate Keller. Helen was born the 27 of June, 1880 at Tusculum, Alabama. Her journey started when she became one and a half, Helen got sick and after her fever went off, she was blind and deaf. Helen could communicate with her family by using hand signals, she always got

Arthur H Keller Research Paper

She was born on June 27, 1880 in Tuscumbia, Connecticut. Her parents were Arthur H. Keller and her mother, Kate Adams. Keller’s sibling were Mildred Campbell and Phillips Brooks Keller. Keller did not did not go to school because people did not understand her. Keller’s childhood was very hard for her.

Hele Helen Keller's Life And Accomplishments

Born on June 27th 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama, with full hearing and sight. In February of 1882, she became ill, and lost her vision and hearing. Helen became a troublesome child with extreme tantrums, they were led Alexander Graham Bell who suggested that the family write to Michael Anagnos, director of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind, and request that he try to find a teacher for Helen.Anagnos recommended a former pupil of the institution, Anne Sullivan.

Helen Keller was born to parents Kate and Kernel Arthur Keller on June 27, 1880 in Tuscambia, Alambama. Her father “was a captain in the

Helen Keller: A Women's Rights Activist

Helen Keller not only overpowered her impairities, but she also taught our World that anything is possible if you are determined. Keller was born healthy, but she began to get sick when she was still very young. When she was just two years old, she developed an illness her family doctor described as “Brain Fever.” The brain fever took both her seeing and hearing abilities, leaving her deaf and blind. Despite her discrepancy, she maintained hopeful and learned new ways to communicate such as signs, speaking, and writing.

Helen Adams Keller was born on June 27th, 1880 to Arthur H. Keller and Katherine Adams Keller. She was born with her sight and hearing senses, but contracted “brain fever” when she was 18 months, which subsequently caused her to lose her sight and hearing. Her mother noticed, a few days after Keller’s fever broke, that she no longer responded to the dinner bell, or when a hand was waved in front of her face.

I Am Helen Keller

In the book I read, I Am Helen Keller by Brad Meltzer, a little girl, Helen Keller, overcomes being blind and deaf. Helen is able to learn many things with her disability and made large impacts to other people’s lives. Helen was strong and believes everybody can overcome any obstacles that comes their way.

Helen Keller: The Most Important Day Of My Life

Helen Adams Keller was an American author, political activist and a lecturer. She was the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. The story of how Keller’s teacher, Anne Sullivan, broke through the isolation imposed by a near complete lack of language, allowing to blossom into the exemplary system of bravery, has been widely shown and known through the dramatizations of the play and film, The miracle worker. She was born in west Tuscumbia, Alabama on June 27, 1880 which is now commemorated as Helen Keller day in the state of Pennsylvania.

"Three Days to See" as published in Atlantic Monthly (January, 1933)

Transcription

"Three Days to See" by Helen Keller

All of us have read thrilling stories in which the hero had only a limited and specified time to live. Sometimes it was as long as a year; sometimes as short as twenty-four hours. But always we were interested in discovering just how the doomed man chose to spend his last days or his last hours. I speak, of course, of free men who have a choice, not condemned criminals whose sphere of activities is strictly delimited.

Such stories set us thinking, wondering what we should do under similar circumstances. What events, what experiences, what associations, should we crowd into those last hours as mortal beings? What happiness should we find in reviewing the past, what regrets?

Sometimes I have thought it would be an excellent rule to live each day as if we should die to-morrow. Such an attitude would emphasize sharply the values of life. We should live each day with a gentleness, a vigor, and a keenness of appreciation which are often lost when time stretches before us in the constant panorama of more days and months and years to come. There are those, of course, who would adopt the epicurean motto of 'Eat, drink, and be merry,' but most people would be chastened by the certainty of impending death.

In stories, the doomed hero is usually saved at the last minute by some stroke of fortune, but almost always his sense of values is changed. He becomes more appreciative of the meaning of life and its permanent spiritual values. It has often been noted that those who live, or have lived, in the shadow of death bring a mellow sweetness to everything they do.

Most of us, however, take life for granted. We know that one day we must die, but usually we picture that day as far in the future. When we are in buoyant health, death is all but unimaginable. We seldom think of it. The days stretch out in an endless vista. So we go about our petty tasks, hardly aware of our listless attitude toward life.

The same lethargy, I am afraid, characterizes the use of all our facilities and senses. Only the deaf appreciate hearing, only the blind realize the manifold blessings that lie in sight. Particularly does this observation apply to those who have lost sight and hearing in adult life. But those who have never suffered impairment of sight or hearing seldom make the fullest use of these blessed faculties. Their eyes and ears take in all sights and sounds hazily, without concentration and with little appreciation. It is the same old story of not being grateful for what we have until we lose it, of not being conscious of health until we are ill.

I have often thought it would be a blessing if each human being were stricken blind and deaf for a few days at some time during his early adult life. Darkness would make him more appreciative of sight; silence would teach him the joys of sound.

Now and then I have tested my seeing friends to discover what they see. Recently I was visited by a very good friend who had just returned from a long walk in the woods, and I asked her what she had observed. 'Nothing in particular,' she replied. I might have been incredulous had I not been accustomed to such responses, for long ago I became convinced that the seeing see little.

How was it possible, I asked myself, to walk for an hour through the woods and see nothing worthy of note? I who cannot see find hundreds of things to interest me through mere touch. I feel the delicate symmetry of a leaf. I pass my hands lovingly about the smooth skin of a silver birch, or the rough, shaggy bark of a pine. In spring I touch the branches of trees hopefully in search of a bud, the first sign of awakening Nature after her winter's sleep. I feel the delightful, velvety texture of a flower, and discover its remarkable convolutions; and something of the miracle of Nature is revealed to me. Occasionally, if I am very fortunate, I place my hand gently on a small tree and feel the happy quiver of a bird in full song. I am delighted to have the cool waters of a brook rush through my open fingers. To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug. To me the pageant of seasons is a thrilling and unending drama, the action of which streams through my finger tips.

At times my heart cries out with longing to see all these things. If I can get so much pleasure from mere touch, how much more beauty must be revealed by sight. Yet, those who have eyes apparently see little. The panorama of color and action which fills the world is taken for granted. It is human, perhaps, to appreciate little that which have and to long for that which we have not, but it is a great pity that in the world of light the gift of sight is used only as a mere convenience rather than as a means of adding fullness to life.

If I were the president of a university I should establish a compulsory course in 'How to Use Your Eyes'. The professor would try to show his pupils how they could add joy to their lives by really seeing what passes unnoticed before them. He would try to awake their dormant and sluggish faculties.

Perhaps I can best illustrate by imagining what I should most like to see if I was given the use of my eyes, say, for just three days. And while I am imagining, suppose you, too, set your mind to work on the problem of how to work on the problem of how you would use your own eyes if you had only three days to see. If with the oncoming darkness if the third night you knew that the sun would never rise for you again, how would you spend those three intervening days? What would you most want to let your gaze rest upon?

I, naturally, should want most to see the things which have become dear to me through my years of darkness. You, too, would want to let your eyes rest long on the things that have become dear to you so that you could take the memory of them with you into the night that loomed before you.

If, by some miracle, I were granted three seeing days, to be followed by a relapse into darkness, I should divide the period into three parts.

On the first day, I should want to see the people whose kindness and gentleness and companionship have made my life worth living. First I should like to gaze long upon the face of my dear teacher, Mrs. Ann Sullivan Macy, who came to me when I was a child and opened the outer world to me. I should want not merely to see the outline of her face, so that I could cherish it in my memory, but to study that face and find in it the living evidence of the sympathetic tenderness and patience with which she accomplished the difficult task of my education. I should like to see in her eyes that strength of character which has enabled her to stand firm in the face of difficulties, and that compassion for all humanity which she has revealed to me so often.

I do not know what it is to see into the heart of a friend through that 'window of the soul,' the eye. I can only 'see' through my finger tips the outline of a face. I can detect laughter, sorrow, and many other obvious emotions. I know my friends from the feel of their faces. But I cannot really picture their personalities, of course, through the thoughts they express to me, through whatever of their actions are revealed to me. But I am denied that deeper understanding of them which I am sure would come through sight of them, through watching their reactions to various expressed and circumstances, through noting the immediate and fleeting reactions of their eyes and countenance.

Friends who are near to me I know well, because through the months and years they reveal themselves to me in all their phases; but of casual friends I have only an incomplete impression, an impression gained from handclasp, from spoken words which I take from their lips with my finger tips, or which they tap into the palm of my hand.

How much easier, how much more satisfying it is for you who can see to grasp quickly the essential qualities of another person by watching the subtleties of expression, the quiver of a muscle, the flutter of a hand. But does it ever occur to you to use your sight to see the inner nature of a friend or acquaintance? Do not most of you seeing people grasp casually the outward features of a face and let it go at that?

For instance, can you describe accurately the faces of five good friends? Some of you can, but many cannot. As an experiment, I have questioned husbands of long standing about the color of their wives' eyes, and often they express embarrassed confusion and admit that they so not know. And, incidentally, it is a chronic complaint of wives that their husbands do not notice new dresses, new hats, and changes in household arrangements.

The eyes of seeing persons soon become accustomed to the routine of their surroundings, and they actually see only the startling and spectacular. But even in viewing the most spectacular sights the eyes are lazy. Court records reveal every day how inaccurately 'eyewitnesses' see. A given event will be 'seen' in several different ways by as many witnesses. Some see more than others, but few see everything that is within the range of their vision.

Oh, the things that I should see if I had the power of sight for just three days!

The first day would be a busy one. I should call to me all my dear friends and look long into their faces, imprinting upon my mind the outward evidence of the beauty that is within them. I should let my eyes rest, too, on the face of a baby, so that I could catch a vision of the eager, innocent beauty which precedes the individuals consciousness of the conflicts which life develops.

And I should like to look into the loyal, trusting eyes of my dogs - the grave, canny little Scottie, Darkie, and the stalwart, understanding Great Dane, Helga, whose warm, tender, and playful friendships are so comforting to me.

On that busy first day I should also view the small simple things of my home. I want to see the warm colors in the rugs under my feet, the pictures on the walls, the intimate trifles that transform a house into a home. My eyes would rest respectfully on the books in raised type which I have read, but they would be more eagerly interested in the printed books which seeing people can read, for during the long night of my life the books I have read and those which have been read to me have built themselves into a great shining lighthouse, revealing to me the deepest channels of human life and the human spirit.

In the afternoon of that first seeing day, I should take a long walk in the woods and intoxicate my eyes on the beauties of the world of Nature, trying desperately to absorb in a few hours the vast splendor which is constantly unfolding itself to those who can see. On the way home from my woodland jaunt my path would lie near a farm so that I might see the patient horses ploughing in the field (perhaps I should see only a tractor!) and the serene content of men living close to the soil. And I should pray for the glory of a colorful sunset.

When dusk had fallen, I should experience the double delight of being able to see by artificial light, which the genius of man has created to extend the power of his sight when Nature decrees darkness.

In the night of that first day of sight, I should not be able to sleep, so full would be my mind of the memories of the day.

The next day - the second day of sight - I should arise with the dawn and see the thrilling miracle by which night is transformed into day. I should behold with awe the magnificent panorama of light with which the sun awakens the sleeping earth.

This day I should devote to a hasty glimpse of the world, past and present. I should want to see the pageant of man's progress, the kaleidoscope of the ages. How can so much compressed into one day? Through the museums, of course. Often I have visited the New York Museum of Natural History to touch with my hands many of the objects there exhibited, but I have longed to see with my eyes the condensed history of the earth and its inhabitants displayed there - animals and the races of men pictured in their native environment; gigantic carcasses of dinosaurs and mastodons which roamed the earth long before man appeared, with his tiny stature and powerful brain, to conquer the animal kingdom; realistic presentations of the processes of evolution in animals, and in the implements which man has used to fashion for himself a secure home on this planet; and a thousand and one other aspects of natural history.

I wonder how many readers of this article have viewed this panorama of the face of living things as pictured in that inspiring museum. Many, of course, have not had the opportunity, but, I am sure that many who have had the opportunity have not made use of it. There, indeed, is a place to use your eyes. You who can see can spend many fruitful days there, but I, with my imaginary three days of sight, could only take a hasty glimpse, and pass on.

My next stop would be the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for just as the Museum of Natural History reveals the material aspects of the world, so does the Metropolitan show the myriad facets of the human spirit. Throughout the history of humanity the urge to artistic expression has been almost as powerful as the urge for food, shelter, and procreation. And here, in the vast chambers of the Metropolitan Museum, is unfolded before me the spirit of Egypt, Greece, and Rome, as expressed in their art. I know well through my hands the sculptured gods and goddesses of the ancient Nile-land. I have a few copies of Parthenon friezes, and I have sensed the rhythmic beauty of charging Athenian warriors. Apollos and Venuses and the winged victory of Samothrace are friends of my finger tips. The gnarled, bearded features of Homer are dear to me, for he, too, knew blindness.

My hands have lingered upon the living marvel of Roman sculpture as well as that of later generations. I have passed my hands over a plaster cast of Michelangelo's inspiring and heroic Moses; I have sensed the power of Rodin; I have been awed by the devoted spirit of Gothic wood carving. These arts which can be touched have meaning for me, but even they were meant to be seen rather than felt, and I can only guess at the beauty which remains hidden from me. I can admire the simple lines of a Greek vase, but its figured decorations are lost to me.

So on this, my second day of sight, I should try to probe into the soul of man through his art. The things I knew through touch I should now see. More splendid still, the whole magnificent world of painting would be opened to me, from the Italian Primitives, with their serene religious devotion, to the Moderns, with their feverish visions. I should look deep into the canvases of Raphael, Leonardo Da Vinci, Titian, Rembrandt. I should want to feast my eyes upon the warm colors of Veronese, study the mysteries of El Greco, catch a new vision of Nature from Corot. Oh, there is so much rich meaning and beauty in the art of the ages for you who have eyes to see!

Upon my short visit to this temple of art I should not be able to review a fraction of that great world of art which is open to you. I should be able to get only a superficial impression. Artists tell me that for a deep and true appreciation of art one must educate the eye. One must learn from experience to weigh the merits of line, of composition, of form and color. If I had eyes, how happily would I embark upon so fascinating a study! Yet I am told that, to many of you who have eyes to see, the world of art is a dark night, unexplored and unilluminated.

It would be with extreme reluctance that I should leave the Metropolitan Museum, which contains the key to beauty - a beauty so neglected. Seeing persons, however, do not need a Metropolitan to find this key to beauty. The same key lies waiting in smaller museums, and in books on the shelves of even small libraries. But naturally, in my limited time of imaginary sight, I should choose the place where the key unlocks the greatest treasures in the shortest time.

The evening of my second day of sight I should spend at a theatre or at the movies. Even now I often attend theatrical performances of all sorts, but the action of the play must be spelled into my hand by a companion. But how I should like to see with my own eyes the fascinating figure of Hamlet, or the gusty Falstaff amid colorful Elizabethan trappings! How I should like to follow each movement of the graceful Hamlet, each strut of the hearty Falstaff! And since I could see only one play, I should be confronted by a many-horned dilemma, for there are scores of plays I should want to see. You who have eyes can see any you like. How many of you, I wonder, when you gaze at a play, a movie, or any spectacle, realize and give thanks for the miracle of sight which enables you to enjoy its color, grace, and movement?

I cannot enjoy the beauty rythmic movement except in a sphere restricted to the touch of my hands. I can vision only dimly the grace of a Pavlowa, although I know something of the delight of rhythm, for often I can sense the beat of music as it vibrates through the floor. I can well imagine that cadenced motion must be one of the most pleasing sights in the world. I have been able to gather something of this by tracing with my fingers the lines in sculptured marble; if this static grace can be so lovely, how much more acute must be the thrill of seeing grace in motion.

One of my dearest memories is of the time when Joseph Jefferson allowed me to touch his face and hands as he went through some of the gestures and speeches of his beloved Rip Van Winkle. I was able to catch thus a meager glimpse of the world of drama, and I shall never forget the delight of that moment. But, oh, how much I must miss, and how much pleasure you seeing ones can derive from watching and hearing the interplay of speech and movement in the unfolding of a dramatic performance! If I could see only one play, I should know how to picture in my mind the action of a hundred plays which I have read or had transferred to me through the medium of manual alphabet.

So, through the evening of my second imaginary day of sight, the great figures of dramatic literature would crowd sleep from my eyes.

The following morning, I should again greet the dawn, anxious to discover new delights, for I am sure that, for those who have eyes which really see, the dawn of each day must be a perpetually new revelation of beauty.

This, according to the terms of my imagined miracle, is to be my third and last day of sight. I shall have no time to waste in regrets or longings; there is too much to see. The first day I devoted to my friends, animate and inanimate. The second revealed to me the history of man and Nature. To-day I shall spend in the workday world of the present, amid the haunts of men going about the business of life. And where one can find so many activities and conditions of men as in New York? So the city becomes my destination.

I start from my home in the quiet little suburb of Forest Hills, Long Island. Here, surrounded by green lawns, trees, and flowers, are neat little houses, happy with the voices and movements of wives and children, havens of peaceful rest for men who toil in the city. I drive across the lacy structure of steel which spans the East River, and I get a new and startling vision of the power and ingenuity of the mind of man. Busy boats chug and scurry about the river - racy speed, boats, stolid, snorting tugs. If I had long days of sight ahead, I should spend many of them watching the delightful activity upon the river.

I look ahead, and before me rise the fantastic towers of New York, a city that seems to have stepped from the pages of a fairy story. What an awe-inspiring sight, these glittering spires, these vast banks of stone and steel - sculptures such as the gods might build for themselves! This animated picture is a part of the lives of millions of people every day. How many, I wonder, give it so much as a second glance? Very few, I fear. Their eyes are blind to this magnificent sight because it is so familiar to them.

I hurry to the top of one of those gigantic structures, the Empire State Building, for there, a short time ago, I 'saw' the city below through the eyes of my secretary. I am anxious to compare my fancy with reality. I am sure I should not be disappointed in the panorama spread out before me, for to me it would be a vision of another world.

Now I begin my rounds of the city. First, I stand at a busy corner, merely looking at people, trying by sight of them to understand something of their lives. I see smiles, and I am happy. I see serious determination, and I am proud. I see suffering, and I am compassionate.

I stroll down Fifth Avenue. I throw my eyes out of focus, so that I see no particular object but a seething kaleidoscope of color. I am certain that the colors of women's dresses moving in a throng must be a gorgeous spectacle of which I should never tire. But perhaps if I had sight I should be like most other women - too interested in styles and the cut of individual dresses to give much attention to the splendor of color in the mass. And I am convinced, too, that I should become an inveterate window shopper, for it must be a delight to the eye to view the myriad articles of beauty on display.

From Fifth Avenue I make a tour of the city - to Park Avenue, to the slums, to factories, to parks where children play. I take a stay-at-home trip abroad by visiting the foreign quarters. Always my eyes are open wide to all the sights of both happiness and misery so that I may probe deep and add to my understanding of how people work and live. My heart is full of the images of people and things. My eye passes lightly over no single trifle; it strives to touch and hold closely each thing its gaze rests upon. Some sights are pleasant, filling the heart with happiness; but some are miserably pathetic. To these latter I do not shut my eyes, for they, too are part of life. To close the eye on them is to close the heart and mind.

My third day of sight is drawing to an end. Perhaps there are many serious pursuits to which I should devote the few remaining hours, but I am afraid that on the evening of that last day I should run away to the theatre, to a hilariously funny play, so that I might appreciate the overtones of comedy in the human spirit.

At midnight my temporary respite from blindness would cease, and permanent night would close in on me again. Naturally in those three short days I should not have seen all I wanted to see. Only when darkness had again descended upon me should I realize how much I had left unseen. But my mind would be so overcrowded with glorious memories that I should have little time for regrets. Thereafter the touch of every object would bring a glowing memory of how that object looked.

Perhaps this short outline of how I should spend three days of sight does not agree with the programme you would set for yourself if you knew that you were about to be stricken blind. I am, however, sure that if you actually faced that fate your eyes would open to things you had never seen before, storing up memories for the long night ahead. You would use your eyes as never before. Everything you saw would become dear to you. Your eyes would touch and embrace every object that came within your range of vision. Then, at last, you would really see, and a new world of beauty would open itself before you.

I who am blind can give one hint to those who see - one admonition to those who would make full use of the gift of sight: Use your eyes as if tomorrow you would be stricken blind. And the same method can be applied to other senses. Hear the music of voices, the song of a bird, the mighty strains of an orchestra, as if you would be stricken deaf to-morrow. Touch each object you want to touch as if tomorrow your tactile sense would fail. Smell the perfume of flowers, taste with relish each morsel, as if tomorrow you could never smell and taste again. Make the most of every sense; glory in all the facets of pleasure and beauty which the world reveals to you through the several means of contact which Nature provides. But of all the senses, I am sure that sight must be the most delightful.

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Past Factory

Past Factory

Helen Keller's Life: A Tale of Incredible Inspiration

Posted: October 24, 2023 | Last updated: October 24, 2023

<p>Even though her father had been a captain in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, Keller's own beliefs were almost completely opposite. She became increasingly involved in politics and was a member of the Socialist Party, helping to found the American Civil Liberties Union or ACLU. </p> <p>She had ultra far-left views and at one point, she was even under investigation by the FBI. Keller is known for her work regarding women's suffrage, worker's rights, and birth control. She also wrote essays about her admiration of Vladimir Lenin and his Socialistic ideals. </p>

Born in Alabama in 1880, Helen Keller faced adversity from an extremely young age after losing her sight and hearing. However, her devotion to learning, guidance from others, and commitment to activism helped her become one of the most influential individuals of the 20th century.

Her entire life is a testament to the strength of the human spirit, as she was able to accomplish much more than most people, without the use of sight and hearing. Take an in-depth look into the incredible life of Helen Keller and what she managed to achieve without the senses many of us take for granted.

<p>Born in 1880, Helen Keller wasn't born blind and deaf. However, she fell ill at just 19 months old with what the doctors called "acute congestion of the stomach and the brain." Today, she most likely would have been diagnosed with Scarlet Fever or Meningitis. While both could have been treated with modern medicine, back then, the consequences were usually severe. </p> <p>After Keller's fever eventually broke, her mother began to notice that she was no longer responding to sounds. After waving a hand in front of her face, she came to the shocking realization that Keller had lost both her eyesight and hearing. </p>

She Wasn't Born Disabled

Born in 1880, Helen Keller wasn't born blind and deaf. However, she fell ill at just 19 months old with what the doctors called "acute congestion of the stomach and the brain." Today, she most likely would have been diagnosed with Scarlet Fever or Meningitis. While both could have been treated with modern medicine, back then, the consequences were usually severe.

After Keller's fever eventually broke, her mother began to notice that she was no longer responding to sounds. After waving a hand in front of her face, she came to the shocking realization that Keller had lost both her eyesight and hearing.

<p>Considering her condition, as a young girl, Keller's behavior was often erratic and extreme. When angry, she would kick and scream in fits of rage, and if happy, would have uncontrollable laughing attacks. Many of her relatives believed that she should be placed in an institution. </p> <p>As it turns out, this was due to her high intelligence paired with her inability to express herself, which became increasingly frustrating for her. She was so desperate to communicate that she had created her own form of sign language with her friend, Martha Washington. By the time she was seven, the two had invented more than 60 different signs. </p>

She Was Described As An Unruly Child

Considering her condition, as a young girl, Keller's behavior was often erratic and extreme. When angry, she would kick and scream in fits of rage, and if happy, would have uncontrollable laughing attacks. Many of her relatives believed that she should be placed in an institution.

As it turns out, this was due to her high intelligence paired with her inability to express herself, which became increasingly frustrating for her. She was so desperate to communicate that she had created her own form of sign language with her friend, Martha Washington. By the time she was seven, the two had invented more than 60 different signs.

<p>Once Keller became involved with Anne Sullivan, her mentor, and teacher, she believed her life truly began. Anne came into Keller's life in 1887 when she was seven years old, and Anne was 21. Anne was also visually impaired and had just graduated from school. Anne then began teaching Keller how to fingerspell, so she would be able to communicate with other people. </p> <p>At first, it was challenging for Keller, but things finally fell into place after Anne put Keller's hand under the water pump and spelled out "water" on her hand. Supposedly, by the end of the night, she had learned 30 different words.</p>

She Claims Her Life Began When She Was Seven Years Old

Once Keller became involved with Anne Sullivan, her mentor, and teacher, she believed her life truly began. Anne came into Keller's life in 1887 when she was seven years old, and Anne was 21. Anne was also visually impaired and had just graduated from school. Anne then began teaching Keller how to fingerspell, so she would be able to communicate with other people.

At first, it was challenging for Keller, but things finally fell into place after Anne put Keller's hand under the water pump and spelled out "water" on her hand. Supposedly, by the end of the night, she had learned 30 different words.

<p>When Keller was just six years old, her parents took her to see Julian John Chisolm, Professor of Diseases of the Eye and Ear at the University of Maryland. He recommended that they take her to see Alexander Graham Bell, a famous inventor credited with creating the first telephone. </p> <p>Bell's wife was deaf and he had established several schools for the deaf as a result and taught deaf students as well. Bell suggested that her parents enroll her at the Perkins Institution for the Blind. It was there Keller first met Sullivan, and along with Bell, they remained friends until his death in 1922. </p>

Alexander Graham Bell Was A Part Of Her Life

When Keller was just six years old, her parents took her to see Julian John Chisolm, Professor of Diseases of the Eye and Ear at the University of Maryland. He recommended that they take her to see Alexander Graham Bell, a famous inventor credited with creating the first telephone.

Bell's wife was deaf and he had established several schools for the deaf as a result and taught deaf students as well. Bell suggested that her parents enroll her at the Perkins Institution for the Blind. It was there Keller first met Sullivan, and along with Bell, they remained friends until his death in 1922.

<p>Keller met Mark Twain in 1895 as a teenager while attending Cambridge School for Young Ladies. The two met for lunch in New York with her recalling that he "treated me not as a freak, but as a handicapped woman seeking a way to circumvent extraordinary difficulties." The two bonded over similar political views and ideologies, as well as the fact that Twain had a daughter the same age as Keller. </p> <p>Twain helped convince industrialist Henry Huttleston Rogers to pay for her education and was openly amazed by the work Anne Sullivan had managed to accomplish. </p>

She Was Good Friends With Mark Twain

Keller met Mark Twain in 1895 as a teenager while attending Cambridge School for Young Ladies. The two met for lunch in New York with her recalling that he "treated me not as a freak, but as a handicapped woman seeking a way to circumvent extraordinary difficulties." The two bonded over similar political views and ideologies, as well as the fact that Twain had a daughter the same age as Keller.

Twain helped convince industrialist Henry Huttleston Rogers to pay for her education and was openly amazed by the work Anne Sullivan had managed to accomplish.

<p>In 1900, Keller was accepted into the renown Radcliff College in Cambridge. Anne was accepted as well so she could attend her classes and help her along the way. Before entering school, she had learned to read peoples' lips using her fingers, as well as braille, typing, and finger spelling. Keller had also learned to speak although not as well as she would have liked.</p> <p>By her junior year, she had written her autobiography, <i>The Story of My Life. </i>By 1904, not only had she written a book, but she also graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, making her the first blind and deaf student to ever attain a college degree. </p>

She Was The First Blind And Deaf Person To Graduate College

In 1900, Keller was accepted into the renown Radcliff College in Cambridge. Anne was accepted as well so she could attend her classes and help her along the way. Before entering school, she had learned to read peoples' lips using her fingers, as well as braille, typing, and finger spelling. Keller had also learned to speak although not as well as she would have liked.

By her junior year, she had written her autobiography, The Story of My Life. By 1904, not only had she written a book, but she also graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, making her the first blind and deaf student to ever attain a college degree.

She Was A Member Of the Socialist Party

Even though her father had been a captain in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, Keller's own beliefs were almost completely opposite. She became increasingly involved in politics and was a member of the Socialist Party, helping to found the American Civil Liberties Union or ACLU.

She had ultra far-left views and at one point, she was even under investigation by the FBI. Keller is known for her work regarding women's suffrage, worker's rights, and birth control. She also wrote essays about her admiration of Vladimir Lenin and his Socialistic ideals.

<p>In 1916, when Keller was 36 years old, she fell in love with Peter Fagan, a former newspaper reporter. Seven years her junior, Fagan was working as her temporary secretary during a period when Sullivan was sick. Fagan returned the feelings to Keller, and the two secretly became engaged and even took out a marriage license. </p> <p>However, upon discovering their secret engagement, Keller's family forbade the marriage on account of her disabilities. Throughout her life, not marrying was one of her biggest regrets.</p>

She Fell In Love With Her Secretary

In 1916, when Keller was 36 years old, she fell in love with Peter Fagan, a former newspaper reporter. Seven years her junior, Fagan was working as her temporary secretary during a period when Sullivan was sick. Fagan returned the feelings to Keller, and the two secretly became engaged and even took out a marriage license.

However, upon discovering their secret engagement, Keller's family forbade the marriage on account of her disabilities. Throughout her life, not marrying was one of her biggest regrets.

<p>In the 1930s, Keller was touring around Japan visiting schools and making public appearances. She was a known animal lover, and a Japanese police officer gave her an Akita named Kamikaze-Go as a present. She immediately bonded with the dog, who unfortunately passed away not long before she returned to the United States.</p> <p>Hearing that her dog died, the Japanese government gifted her another dog from the same litter and shipped it to the United States. This made Keller the first person to bring the dog breed into the U.S. After World War II, she returned to Japan once again to visit the disabled in military hospitals. </p>

She Was The First Person To Bring The Akita Breed To The US

In the 1930s, Keller was touring around Japan visiting schools and making public appearances. She was a known animal lover, and a Japanese police officer gave her an Akita named Kamikaze-Go as a present. She immediately bonded with the dog, who unfortunately passed away not long before she returned to the United States.

Hearing that her dog died, the Japanese government gifted her another dog from the same litter and shipped it to the United States. This made Keller the first person to bring the dog breed into the U.S. After World War II, she returned to Japan once again to visit the disabled in military hospitals.

<p>While Keller and Sullivan had become widely known to the public, they weren't making a comfortable living based on their earnings from Keller's lectures and writings. So, during the 1920s, the duo spent four years on the vaudeville circuit. </p> <p>During that time, Keller would discuss her life and host Q&A sessions where audiences could ask questions and Sullivan would translate. People couldn't fathom the hardships she had managed to overcome.</p>

She Was Named The Eighth Wonder of The World

While Keller and Sullivan had become widely known to the public, they weren't making a comfortable living based on their earnings from Keller's lectures and writings. So, during the 1920s, the duo spent four years on the vaudeville circuit.

During that time, Keller would discuss her life and host Q&A sessions where audiences could ask questions and Sullivan would translate. People couldn't fathom the hardships she had managed to overcome.

<p>In 1919, Keller starred in <i>Deliverance, </i>a film about herself. During that time, she became friendly with many Hollywood A-listers such as Charlie Chapman and other prominent individuals in the media industry. In 1955, at the age of 75, Keller accepted an Academy Award for the documentary about her life titled <i>Helen Keller: In Her Story. </i></p> <p>Of course, depictions of her life didn't stop there. The William Gibson play <i>The Miracle Worker </i>won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960 and was turned into a film two years later. Anne Bancroft won Best Actress for her performance as Sullivan, and Patty Duke won Best Supporting Actress for playing Keller. </p>

She's An Oscar Winner

In 1919, Keller starred in Deliverance, a film about herself. During that time, she became friendly with many Hollywood A-listers such as Charlie Chapman and other prominent individuals in the media industry. In 1955, at the age of 75, Keller accepted an Academy Award for the documentary about her life titled Helen Keller: In Her Story.

Of course, depictions of her life didn't stop there. The William Gibson play The Miracle Worker won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960 and was turned into a film two years later. Anne Bancroft won Best Actress for her performance as Sullivan, and Patty Duke won Best Supporting Actress for playing Keller.

<p>In 2003, as part of the 50 state quarters program, Keller's image was printed on the Alabama State quarter. On the quarter, Keller is depicted sitting in a rocking chair while reading a book in braille. </p> <p>The coin was introduced in March 2003, with her name printed on the quarter in typical lettering as well as braille. Beneath the image of her is the phrase "Spirit <i>of</i> Courage." These coins were produced for just ten weeks and are now considered a collector's item. </p>

Her Likeness Is On A US Quarter

In 2003, as part of the 50 state quarters program, Keller's image was printed on the Alabama State quarter. On the quarter, Keller is depicted sitting in a rocking chair while reading a book in braille.

The coin was introduced in March 2003, with her name printed on the quarter in typical lettering as well as braille. Beneath the image of her is the phrase "Spirit of Courage." These coins were produced for just ten weeks and are now considered a collector's item.

<p>Although there is still a substantial amount of footage of Keller, as well as her works, there used to be much more. Unfortunately, much of her archival footage and other material was stored at the World Trade Center. </p> <p>During the attack on September 11, almost all of it was lost in the destruction of the towers. Furthermore, the offices of Helen Keller Worldwide were located just a block away from the World Trade Centers, and they too were also destroyed in the wake of the attacks. </p>

Many Of Her Archives Were Destroyed

Although there is still a substantial amount of footage of Keller, as well as her works, there used to be much more. Unfortunately, much of her archival footage and other material was stored at the World Trade Center.

During the attack on September 11, almost all of it was lost in the destruction of the towers. Furthermore, the offices of Helen Keller Worldwide were located just a block away from the World Trade Centers, and they too were also destroyed in the wake of the attacks.

<p>In 1946, Keller was appointed counselor of international relations for the American Foundation of Overseas Blind. In total, she went to 39 different countries throughout her life. </p> <p>During her travels, she made it a point to advocate for educational policies for the disabled to the many world leaders that she encountered. She also particularly fell in love with the Middle East.</p>

She Travelled Extensively

In 1946, Keller was appointed counselor of international relations for the American Foundation of Overseas Blind. In total, she went to 39 different countries throughout her life.

During her travels, she made it a point to advocate for educational policies for the disabled to the many world leaders that she encountered. She also particularly fell in love with the Middle East.

<p>Born in Alabama in 1880, Helen Keller faced adversity from an extremely young age after losing her sight and hearing. However, her devotion to learning, guidance from others, and commitment to activism helped her become one of the most influential individuals of the 20th century. </p> <p>Her entire life is a testament to the strength of the human spirit, as she was able to accomplish much more than most people, without the use of sight and hearing. Take an in-depth look into the incredible life of Helen Keller and what she managed to achieve without the senses many of us take for granted. </p>

Keller And Sullivan Were Inseparable

From the time that Keller met Sullivan when she was just seven years old, the two became inseparable for the rest of their lives. Most likely, Keller would have been institutionalized without the help of Sullivan, who was there for her every step of the way. They spent their lives together from attending college, traveling the world, and leaving lasting impressions on people around the world.

When Sullivan passed away in 1936, Keller was next to her, holding her hand. Keller notes that the moment she met Sullivan was when her "soul was born." The two women are buried side-by-side at the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

<p>In 1952, Keller visited the Middle East where she met with political leaders about the rights of the blind and the disabled. In Egypt, she managed to convince the Minister of Education to establish secondary schools for the blind that would aid in them receiving college educations. </p> <p>In Israel, Jerusalem's Helen Keller School was named in her honor. For her work, in 1953, Keller was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. However, the award went to George Catlett Marshall for his post-war work after World War II. </p>

She Was Nominated For The Nobel Peace Prize

In 1952, Keller visited the Middle East where she met with political leaders about the rights of the blind and the disabled. In Egypt, she managed to convince the Minister of Education to establish secondary schools for the blind that would aid in them receiving college educations.

In Israel, Jerusalem's Helen Keller School was named in her honor. For her work, in 1953, Keller was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. However, the award went to George Catlett Marshall for his post-war work after World War II.

<p>For a lifetime of hard work and activism, Keller was recognized on numerous occasions. In 1936 she received the Theodore Roosevelt Distinguished Sevice Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964, and election to the Women's Hall of Fame in 1965. </p> <p>Moreover, Keller received honorary doctoral degrees from several universities both at home and abroad including Harvard University. She continued to be honored after her death in 1968, appearing on <i>Time's </i>1999 list of the 100 most important figures of the 20th century, among other recognitions. </p>

She Has An Impressive List Of Awards And Accolades

For a lifetime of hard work and activism, Keller was recognized on numerous occasions. In 1936 she received the Theodore Roosevelt Distinguished Sevice Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964, and election to the Women's Hall of Fame in 1965.

Moreover, Keller received honorary doctoral degrees from several universities both at home and abroad including Harvard University. She continued to be honored after her death in 1968, appearing on Time's 1999 list of the 100 most important figures of the 20th century, among other recognitions.

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COMMENTS

  1. Helen Keller

    Published: Aug 6, 2021 Helen Keller is one of the most memorable women in history. She was truly an exceptional and courageous person with inner strength. She was certainly a hero. Helen Keller was blind and deaf, and although that left her and her family devastated, she did not let this major obstacle ruin her good spirits or her life.

  2. Helen Keller

    Helen Keller (born June 27, 1880, Tuscumbia, Alabama, U.S.—died June 1, 1968, Westport, Connecticut) American author and educator who was blind and deaf. Her education and training represent an extraordinary accomplishment in the education of persons with these disabilities. Helen Keller's birthplace Helen Keller's birthplace, Tuscumbia, Alabama.

  3. "A Chat About the Hand"

    The 1905 essay by Helen Keller presented here, "A Chat About the Hand," conveys in great detail how she communicated and sensed the world around her. At right, Helen Keller in 1904. This entry in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica illustrates how accomplished she was already (with decades to live yet ahead of her) at the age of thirty-one:

  4. Helen Keller

    Helen Keller was an American educator, advocate for the blind and deaf and co-founder of the ACLU. Stricken by an illness at the age of 2, Keller was left blind and deaf. Beginning in 1887,...

  5. Helen Keller

    Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 - June 1, 1968) was an American author, disability rights advocate, political activist and lecturer. Born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, she lost her sight and her hearing after a bout of illness when she was 19 months old.

  6. Helen Keller's Books, Essays, and Speeches

    Helen Keller wrote 14 books and over 475 speeches and essays on topics such as faith, blindness prevention, birth control, the rise of fascism in Europe, and atomic energy. Her autobiography has been translated into 50 languages and remains in print.

  7. Helen Keller Biography

    The Helen Keller Archives contain over 475 speeches and essays that she wrote on topics such as faith, blindness prevention, birth control, the rise of fascism in Europe, and atomic energy. Helen used a braille typewriter to prepare her manuscripts and then copied them on a regular typewriter.

  8. The Helen Keller You Didn't Learn About in School

    Keller wrote 14 books and more than 475 speeches and essays. "Since society only portrays Helen Keller as a little girl, a lot of people subconsciously learn to infantilize disabled adults. And ...

  9. How Helen Keller Learned to Write

    How Helen Keller Learned to Write. With the help of her teacher, Annie Sullivan, Keller forged a path from deaf-blind darkness to unimaginable artistry. By Cynthia Ozick. June 8, 2003. When Helen ...

  10. The World I Live In and Optimism: A Collection of Essays

    Helen Keller 4.18 173 ratings21 reviews These poetic, inspiring essays offer insights into the world of a gifted woman who was deaf and blind. Helen Keller relates her impressions of life's beauty and promise, perceived through the sensations of touch, smell, and vibration, together with the workings of a powerful imagination.

  11. The Story of My Life Summary

    Helen Keller was born on June 27, 1880 in the small town of Tuscumbia, Alabama. When she was a year old, she was stricken with an illness that left her without sight or hearing. In the early years after her illness, it was difficult for her to communicate, even with her family; she lived her life entirely in the dark, often angry and frustrated ...

  12. Optimism: An Essay

    Optimism. : Helen Keller. T.Y. Crowell and Company, 1903 - Philosophy - 75 pages. 1903. An essay written by the American author and lecturer. Helen Keller was left blind, deaf and mute at the age of nineteen months due to an illness. She spent many years lecturing on behalf of blind and deaf persons, promoting optimism and the brighter side of ...

  13. Helen Keller

    Helen Keller was both blind and deaf . But despite these disabilities, she became a skilled writer and speaker.

  14. Optimism: An Essay by Helen Keller

    Free kindle book and epub digitized and proofread by volunteers.

  15. Opinion

    By M. Leona Godin. Dr. Godin is a writer, performer and educator and the author of "There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness.". Like many disabled people who grew up in ...

  16. Helen Keller: The Most Important Day

    We will write a custom essay on your topic. Even the movie made on Helen Keller, The Miracle Worker, dedicates a part to "the most important day" of Helen's life when she learns her very first word, water. Anne desperately tries to make Helen understand the work by signing it on her hand and suddenly Helen realizes what Anne is trying to ...

  17. Optimism (1903)

    Helen Keller Books, Essays, and Speeches Optimism (1903) Transcription "Optimism" Part I Optimism Within Could we choose our environment, and were desire in human undertakings synonymous with endowment, all men would, I suppose, be optimists. Certainly most of us regard happiness as the proper end of all earthly enterprise.

  18. Optimism, : an essay, : Keller, Helen, 1880-1968

    Optimism, : an essay, by Keller, Helen, 1880-1968. Publication date 1903 Topics Optimism Publisher New York : T.Y. Crowell and Company Collection bostonpubliclibrary; americana Contributor Boston Public Library Language English. Printed by D.B. Updike, The Merrymount Press, Boston Addeddate 2011-05-16 13:43:16 Bookplateleaf 0004 Call number

  19. Essay on Helen Keller

    February 12, 2024 by sastry Essay on Helen Keller: "The public must learn that the blind man is neither genius nor a freak nor an idiot. He has a mind that can be educated it is the duty of the public to help him make the best of himself." These words by Helen Keller echo the fact that disability need not be the end of the world.

  20. Optimism: An Essay by Helen Keller

    Blind and deaf since infancy, American memoirist and lecturer Helen Adams Keller learned to read, to write, and to speak from her teacher Anne Sullivan, graduated from Radcliffe in 1904, and lectured widely on behalf of sightless people; her books include Out of the Dark (1913). Conditions bound not Keller.

  21. Helen Keller Essay

    Helen Keller Essay Helen Keller Essay 1419 Words 6 Pages Helen Keller Helen Keller was an American author who lived to educate and inspire others to become the most unique author of her time. She was a gifted woman who had exceptional writing abilities. She utilized simplistic style to correspond with all varieties of people.

  22. "Three Days to See" as published in Atlantic Monthly (January, 1933)

    Helen Keller; Books, Essays, and Speeches; On the Senses "Three Days to See" as published in Atlantic Monthly (January, 1933) Transcription "Three Days to See" by Helen Keller. I. All of us have read thrilling stories in which the hero had only a limited and specified time to live. Sometimes it was as long as a year; sometimes as short as ...

  23. Helen Keller's Life: A Tale of Incredible Inspiration

    Born in Alabama in 1880, Helen Keller faced adversity from an extremely young age after losing her sight and hearing. However, her devotion to learning, guidance from others, and commitment to ...