Helen Keller

Writer, lecturer, advocate for the deaf and blind. Born June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama, to parents Arthur, an editor, and Kate (née Adams). At the age of 19 months, Keller was struck with a fever that left her blind and deaf. A devoted tutor, Anne Sullivan Macy taught Keller to read, write, and speak; and Keller spent the remainder of her life leading humanitarian efforts to vastly improve the quality of living for the disabled.
An undisciplined and rebellious child, Keller frequently had explosive tantrums, which she later attributed to a sense of frustration at her inability to communicate like others. In The Story of My Life (1903), she writes, “Sometimes I stood between two persons who were conversing and touched their lips. I could not understand, and was vexed. I moved my lips and gesticulated frantically without result. This made me so angry at times that I kicked and screamed until I was exhausted.” There were few options for her education. Out of desperation, her father traveled with his daughter to Washington D.C., where Dr. Alexander Graham Bell—whose invention of a system of writing for the blind had made him a pioneer in the field—examined Keller. Dr. Bell referred her to the venerable Perkins Institution for the Blind, located in Boston, Massachusetts, which recommended the tutelage of recent top-honors Perkins graduate, Anne Sullivan.
The relationship between Keller and Sullivan that began in 1887, when Keller was only six years old, lasted until Sullivan’s death in 1936. Using a manual alphabet in which she would slowly spell out the words of objects in the palm of Keller’s hand, Sullivan gave Keller her first fundamental lesson that things had names. In 1888, Keller began learning to read Braille at the Perkins Institution, accompanied by Sullivan. Keller proved to be a bright and creative student, and she attended the Horace Mann School for the Deaf from 1890-94, where she began learning to speak. At the age of 14, she enrolled in the Wright-Humason School in New York City, followed by the Cambridge School for Young Ladies, which she began attending in 1896. In 1900, she enrolled at Radcliffe College, where she studied with the painstaking help of Sullivan—who transcribed reading assignments to Keller for hours each day. During this time, in addition to penning her first autobiography, The Story of My Life (1903), Keller also served as an advocate for people with visual and hearing disabilities on the Massachusetts state commission for the welfare of the blind. In 1904, Keller graduated from Radcliffe with honors.
In 1905, Anne Sullivan married John Albert Macy, a professor at Harvard University, who had collaborated with Keller on her first book. Sullivan’s marriage to Macy did nothing to alter her friendship with Keller. Directly after graduating from college, Keller began her attack on public indifference of the blind and deaf. She began publishing articles on preventing blindness in newborns, a topic that had previously been taboo because of its relation to sexually transmitted disease. Her work appeared in such newspapers and magazines as the Ladies' Home Journal and the Kansas City Star. In 1913, at the same time that Sullivan and Macy separated, Keller began lecturing in the United States. In 1914, she made her first trip abroad with Sullivan as her assistant. Throughout the rest of her life, Keller and Sullivan traveled to countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa where Keller gained international renown as the foremost advocate for people with disabilities. She made it her tireless mission to create social reform; among her successes, she helped to eliminate the practice of institutionalizing the disabled.
In 1930, she founded the Helen Keller Endowment Fund for the American Foundation for the Blind. Keller received numerous national and international awards for her humanitarian efforts, including the Theodore Roosevelt Distinguished Service Medal (1936), the distinguished service medal from the American Association of Workers for the Blind (1951), the French Legion of Honor (1952), and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964).
She was the author of numerous works of poetry, journals, and political essays related to blindness, as well as two additional autobiographies: Midstream: My Later Life (1929), and Helen Keller in Scotland (1933).
A play based on the inspirational story of Sullivan’s influence on Keller, The Miracle Worker, by William Gibson, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960. Two years later, the play was made into an Academy Award winning film starring Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke.
Keller died on June 1, 1968, in Westport, Connecticut and was buried at St. Joseph's Chapel in Washington Cathedral, Washington, D.C.