Helen's Biography

Helen Keller was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama on June 27, 1880, the daughter of Captain Arthur H. Keller and Kate Adams Keller. Captain Keller was the owner of a struggling newspaper, the North Alabamian. Helen had two younger siblings, Mildred and Phillips Brooks Keller and two half brothers, James and Simpson, from her father's prior marriage.

In February 1882, at the age of nineteen months, before she had learned to speak, Helen Keller became blind and deaf as a result of a sudden illness, possibly scarlet fever or typhoid. Communication with the child became extremely difficult and she became uncontrollable. In 1886, the Keller family visited Alexander Graham Bell, who put them in touch with Michael Anagnos, the director of the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, Massachusetts. Anagnos assigned Anne Sullivan, a recent Perkins' graduate and herself visually impaired, as a teacher for Helen.

Sullivan was just fourteen years Helen Keller's senior when she traveled to Tuscumbia, Alabama in March 1887 to teach the six-year-old child. Influenced by Anna Montessori, Anne Sullivan believed in fostering the abilities and needs of the individual child rather than instructing a child by rote in a traditional classroom environment. Sullivan rapidly helped Helen understand that the letters she continually signed into her hands created words with meanings. Helen's education began in 1888 and lasted until 1904. During these sixteen years she attended the Perkins School for the Blind, the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York City, the Cambridge School for Young Ladies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and finally Radcliffe College in Massachusetts, where she graduated cum laude with a bachelor of arts degree. Keller was an excellent student. Her studies included politics, literature, and philosophy as well as French, German, Latin, and Greek.

Helen Keller published her first book in 1903, while a student at Radcliffe College. The Story of My Life was an enormous success and over the subsequent six decades it was translated into more than fifty languages. Following Keller's graduation in 1904, she and Anne moved into a house in Wrentham, Massachusetts, where they sought to support themselves through Keller's writing. They were joined there by Anne's future husband, John Albert Macy, who became Keller's editor. Between 1903 and 1955, Keller wrote fourteen books and hundreds of magazine articles and speeches. However, income from her written work was not enough to sustain her financially and periodically, from 1916 until 1922, Anne Sullivan Macy and Helen Keller toured the nation giving lectures and performing on the vaudeville circuit. The vaudeville act was in the form of questions posed by Anne to Helen on politics, blindness, and social issues.

By 1909 Keller had become a socialist and corresponded with figures such as Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, and Arturo Giovannitti. She supported the popular demand for workers' rights as well as rights for women. In 1914 she opposed U.S. entry into the First World War. Keller had a wide social circle that included artists, writers, actors, scientists, social reformers, and leading political figures. Close, long-term friends included her childhood mentors Alexander Graham Bell and Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain), as well as the artist Jo Davidson, actress Katharine Cornell, and Takeo Iwahashi, a leader of advocacy for the blind in Japan, who was himself blind.

It was as an advocate for the blind and deaf-blind that Keller found her preeminent vocation in life. Keller's advocacy work spanned six decades, from 1899 when she and Anne Sullivan Macy considered creating a school for deaf, mute, and blind children, to 1959 when she drafted a letter to Senator Lister Hill of Alabama, supporting a bill to create an International Center for Medical Health Research.

The bulk of those sixty years were spent as an advocate for the American Foundation for the Blind. She joined AFB in 1924. AFB was created as a private organization in 1921, originally deriving much of its support from private individuals. Fundraising on behalf of the blind began to shift in the early twentieth century, away from private, philanthropic care of the blind to state and ultimately federal funding. Keller, whose own education was paid for by Boston philanthropists, assisted AFB in soliciting state and federal authorities for funding as well as continuing to elicit support from private donors.

Throughout her career Keller spoke and wrote on blindness and deafness issues. She vociferously promoted the changing image of the blind as citizens with abilities rather than disabilities. She sought to ameliorate conditions for the blind through legislation and was a proponent of medical research and rehabilitation for blind veterans domestically as well as for the indigent blind abroad. Within the United States, her support of a government bill frequently brought ratification in the state or federal legislature, including the appropriation of funds for the Talking Book Program during the Roosevelt Administration in 1935.

Keller continued to fight for the blind and deaf-blind when she was well into her sixties and seventies, by which time she had campaigned for six decades and had traveled to thirty-nine countries, demanding government appropriations for blindness. Her trips abroad during the 1940s and 1950s were sponsored by the American Foundation for Overseas Blind and were endorsed by the United States Information Agency. Helen Keller died in 1968. Her legacy can be seen in the large number of services for blind children, rehabilitation centers, and girl and boy scout troops that were established in her name throughout the world. The complexities of her achievements as a woman who was both hugely reliant on others for information, but herself engaged in advocacy for the blind as well as cultural and political debate, continues to make her a relevant and fascinating figure in American history.

Chronology