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Helen Keller (1880-1968) | ||
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Helen Keller was an American writer, who proved how language could liberate the blind and the deaf. Under the tutelage of Anne Sullivan, who became her lifelong friend, she learned to speak, use sign language, read Braille and type. Keller's books include The Story of My Life (1903) and Out of the Dark (1913). Her life inspired Arthur Penn's Oscar-winning film The Miracle Worker (1962). "Children who hear acquire language without any particular effort; the words that fall from others' lips they catch on the wing, as it were, delightedly, while the little deaf child must trap them by a slow and often painful process. But whatever the process, the result is wonderful. 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." (The Story of My Life by Helen Keller, Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1914, p. 29; first published in 1903) Helen Keller was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama, the daughter of Captain
Arthur Henley Keller, a cotton plantation owner and the editor of a
local newspaper. Helen's mother, Kate Adams Keller, was a Memphis belle
who was twenty years younger than her husband. Helen lost her hearing
and sight at 19 months of age, but she had learned the meaning of the
word "water," and her vision had been excellent. As she grew up, Keller managed to learn to do tiny errands, but also realized that she was missing something. Afterward she described herself a "wild, unruly child". Keller was sent to a state school for the blind, but failed first grade because she could not read Braille. At the age of fourteen, she was physically more developed than most of the girls of her age; she had large breasts, small hips, her hair was the color of chestnut. ('Revisioning Helen Keller I: The Sex Life of a Saint' by Kenneth Ring; https://www.kenringblog.com/. Accessed 1 July 2025) For medical and cosmetic reasons, Keller's eyes were removed and replaced with glass ones. Her prosthetic eyes were blue, the color of the sky. Alexander
Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, adviced the Kellers to ask
the director of the Perkins Institution about obtaining a teacher for
Helen. Bell thought that sign language isolated the deaf. Books were
the key to learning. "I would have a deaf child read books in order to
learn the language, instead of learning the language in order to read
books," Bell argued. (Dear Dr. Bell... Your Friend, Helen Keller by Judith St. George, New York: Scholastic Inc., 1994, p. 32) In 1887 Anne Sullivan (1866-1936), originally Joanna Mansfield Sullivan, became Helen's tutor. Sullivan was born in Feeding Hills, MA. She was nearly blind from childhood fever. Sullivan was educated at the Perkins Institution in Waltham, MA. There she taught the seven-year-old Helen Keller, and managed to broke through her isolation by spelling out words on her hand. "The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher, Anne Mansfield, came to me," Keller said in her autobiography. (Ibid., p. 21) Under her tutelage, Keller discovered that words were related to things. At the well-house Sullivan place her hand under the spout, under cool stream of water, and spelled into the other hand the word water. "That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free." (Ibid., p. 23) For the rest of her life she remained Keller's companion. She called her always "Teacher". Sullivan also established her own reputation as an author, lecturer, and advocate for the deaf. However, before Keller a deaf-blind girl named Laura Bridgman was
taught by Dr. Samuel Grindley Howe to communicate in English and to be
a sewing teacher, but when she died in 1889 at the age of 59, her
example was mostly forgotten. (The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the Original Deaf-Blind Girl by Elisabeth Gitter, 2001; The Education of Laura Bridgman by Ernest Freeberg, 2001) Keller was taught to speak by Sarah Fuller of the Horace Mann School in 1890. Eventually she learned to use sign language, to read Braille, to type – and to dance and ride on horseback. She attended the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York (1894-96), the Cambridge school for Young Ladies (1896-1900), and graduated from Radcliffe College in 1904 with honors in German and English. Keller made considerable progress in the study of arithmetic and her autobiography showed unusual literary talent. In her books Midstrem (1930) and The Story of My Life (1903),
which was dedicated to her benefactor Alexander Graham Bell, Keller
depicted how she was hungry for the words, saying
"literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of
the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my
book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. The
things I have learned and the things I have been taught seem of
ridiculously little importance compared with their "large loves and
heavenly charities."" (Ibid., pp. 117-118) The Story of My Life, Keller's famous
account of her triumph over deafness and blindness, appeared when she
was twenty-two. It was first published serially in The Ladies Home Journal,
and then in book form. Keller wrote with Braille machine, but she also
used a manual typewriter. Her manuscripts
seldom contained typographical errors. From 1914 her secretary was Miss
Polly Thomson. She died in 1960. Since then her companion was Mrs.
Winifred Corbally. "Those were fun years," she said. "It was a time of
her life when she could have fun. Miss Keller was a rogue." (Helen Keller: Rebellious Spirit by Laurie Lawlor, New York: Holiday House, 2001, p. 149) In 1909 Keller joined the Socialist party in Massachusetts. She had
read Marx and Engels in German braille, and welcomed the Revolution in
Russia in 1917. She declared in 1920 at New York's Madison Square
Garden: "In the East a new star is risen! With pain and anguish the Old
Order has given birth to the New, and behold in the East a man-child is
born! Onward, comrades, all together! Onward to the campfires of
Russia! Onward to the Coming Dawn!" (Helen Keller: Her Socialist Years: Writings and Speeches, edited, with an introduction by Philip S. Foner, New York: International Publishers, 1967, p. 16) At the age of 36 she fell in love with Peter Fagan, a journalist, who worked as her temporary secretary. "His love was a bright sun that shone upon my helplessness and isolation," Keller recalled. "The sweetness of being loved enchanted me, and I yielded to an imperious longing to be a part of man's life." (The World at Her Fingertips: The Story of Helen Keller by Joan Dash, New York: Scholastic Press, 2001, pp. 149-150) They applied for a marriage licence but the romance was ended by Mrs. Keller, who disliked Fagan and ordered him out of the house. Keller's life was not free from financial problems. In 1919 she
began a four-year stretch appearing with Sullivan in vaudeville shows.
On her tour, she met such celebrities as Charlie Chaplin, Enrico
Caruso, and Harpo Marx. In the 1920s Keller moved from Wrentham, Mass,
to Forest Hills, Queens. She made lecture tours to promote
interest in the handicapped and wrote books. Moreover, she appeared on the
Orpheum Circuit for two years to support herself. Due to her political views, Keller was also one of the
authors whose books were burned by the Nazis in the 1930s. She
responded with a letter saying, "Do not imagine your barbarities to the
Jews are unknown here. God sleepeth not, and He will visit his Judgment
upon you. . . . Better were it for you to have a mill-stone hung round your
neck and sink into the sea than to be hated and despised of all men."
('Letter from Helen Keller to Adolf Hitler,' May 9, 1933; https://www.afb.org/HelenKellerArchive. Accessed 1 July 2025) When Sullivan died in 1936, Keller sat beside the bed of her
teacher. While traveling to Japan in 1937 on board the ocean liner Asama-Maru, she read Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, 12 volumes in the Braille system. After WW II, Keller visited American veteran's hospitals and made
many tours in Europe, Asia, and Africa. From her tour in South Africa on a fundraising expedition, the popular English writer Nicholas Monsarrat got the idea for his novel The Story of Esther Costello (1953), about the exploitation of a blind deaf-mute girl. In 1946 Keller visited Greece, walked in Athens up to Acropolis, and wrote of Anne Sullivan: "Teacher, as I always called Anne Sullivan Macy, was with me, though unseen, and the Greek myths and poems which she had repeated to me as a child assumed a living reality." And she added: "The climb up the Acropolis symbolized the difficulties Teacher and I had overcome together and I was spiritually strengthened to ascend a metaphorical Acropolis in my work for the blind." (Teacher: Anne Sullivan Macy by Helen Keller, introduction by Nella Braddy Henney, Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1956) As an activist for racial and sexual equality, and an avowed socialist, Keller was put under surveillance by the FBI. In 1964 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Helen Keller died on June 1, 1968, in Westport. The Miracle Worker, which was based on Keller's life, was aired on television in 1959, and it was later adapted for the stage and film, directed by Arthur Penn. The film was awarded with two Oscar's. Anne Bancroft was in the role of Annie Sullivan, repeating her stage success. She was voted best actress. Patty Duke as Helen Keller won the Best Supporting Actress award. The screenplay was written by William Gibson from his play. For many persons, meeting her first time was like a religious
experience, but they soon realized that she was not an ethereal, virginal
figure from some Renaissance painting, but a tall, dark, beautiful
woman, who had a goog sense of humor. Keller was always photographed from her right side. O.O. McIntyre, a
columnist of the period speculated that "when younger there was a
question to have or not have a blemish on her cheek removed and it was
finally decided it might cause her mental anguish to tell her about it.
The same counsil of friends persuaded her never to marry." (Helen Keller: A Life by Dorothy Herrmann, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998, p. 362) Mark Twain declared that the two most interesting characters of his century were Napoleon and Helen Keller. The British historian and philosopher Theodore Zeldin wrote: "No history of the world can be complete which does not mention Mary Helen Keller (1880-1968), whose overcoming of her blindness and deafness were arguably victories more important than those of Alexander the Great, because they have implications still for every living person." (An Intimate History of Humanity by Theodore Zeldin, York: HarperPerennial, 1996, p. 289) Some of the stories Sullivan read to her in
her childhood later left traces to Keller's own writings. "The young
writer, as Stevenson has said, instinctively tries to copy whatever
seems most admirable, and he shifts his admiration with astonishing
versatility. It is only after years if this sort of practice that even
great men have learned to marshal the legion of words which come
thronging through every byway of the mind." (The Story of My Life, pp. 69-70) Among
others Margaret T. Canby's fairy tale 'The Frost Fairies' was read to
her in the summer of 1888, when she was eight years old and she had
been under instruction only from March 1887. Keller forgot completely
it but four years later she produced her own interpretation, 'The Frost
King.' The style of her version is in some respects more poetic than in the
original work; Keller used "wast wealth" instead of "treasure" and "bethought" instead of "concluded". (Explaining Theoretical Langusge and Linguistics by Micheal Graves, Bibliotex, 2002, p. 184; https://www.bibliotex.com/home. Accessed 1 July 2025)
For further reading: Helen Keller and Mark Twain: How They Met, Their Humble Beginnings and Amazing Achievements by Philip Wolny (2024); After the Miracle: the Political Crusades of Helen Keller by Max Wallace (2023); Helen Keller and Alexander Graham Bell by Jill Keppeler (2022); Helen Keller: A Life in American History by Meredith Eliassen (2021); Letters from Red Farm: The Untold Story of the Friendship Between Helen Keller and Journalist Joseph Edgar Chamberlin by Elizabeth Emerson (2021); Helen Keller: Her Life in Pictures by George Sullivan (2007); Helen Keller: A Photographic Story of a Life by Leslie Garrett (2004); The World at Her Fingertips: The Story of Helen Keller by Joan Dash (2001); Helen Keller: Rebellious Spirit by Laurie Lawlor ( 2001); Helen Keller: From Tragedy to Triumph by Katharine E. Wilkie, et al. (1999); Helen Keller: A Life by Dorothy Herrmann (1998); Dear Dr. Bell... Your Friend, Helen Keller by Judith St. George (1992); Helen Keller by Carolyn Sloan (1991); Helen Keller: Crusader for the Blind and Deaf by Stewart Graff, et al. (l991); Helen Keller by Margaret Davidson and Wendy Watson (1989); Helen and Teacher: The Story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy by Joseph P. Lash (1980); Helen Keller by Robert Hogrogian (1979); The Value of Determination: The Story of Helen Keller by Ann Donegan Johnson (1977) Selected works / Helen Keller:
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