Helen Keller (1880 – 1968) ，was an American author, political activist and lecturer. She was the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. The story of how Keller's teacher, Annie Sullivan, broke through the isolation impod by a near complete lack of language, allowing the girl to blossom as she learned to communicate, has become known worldwide through the dramatic depictions of the play and film The Miracle Worker. A prolific author, Keller was well traveled and was outspoken in her opposition to war. She campaigned for women's suffrage, workers' rights, and socialism, as well as many other progressive caus. Early childhood and illness Helen Adams Keller was born at an estate called Ivy Green in Tuscumbia, Alabama, on June 27, 1880, to Captain Arthur H. Keller, a former officer of the Confederate Army, and Kate Adams Keller, a cousin of Robert E. Lee and daughter of Charles W. Adams, a former Confederate general. The Keller family originates from Germany. Helen Keller was not born blind and deaf; it was not until she was nineteen months old that she contracted an illness described by doctors as "an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain," which could possibly have been scarlet fever or meningitis. The illness did not last for a particularly long time, but it left her deaf and blind. A
t that time, her only communication partner was Martha Washington, the six-year-old daughter of the family cook, who was able to create a sign language with her; by the age of ven, she had over sixty home signs to communicate with her family. According to Soviet blind-deaf psychologist A. Meshcheryakov, Martha's friendship and teaching was crucial for Helen's later developments. In 1886, her mother, inspired by an account in Charles Dickens' American Notes of the successful education of another deaf and blind child, Laura Bridgman, dispatched young Helen, accompanied by her father, to ek out Dr. J. Julian Chisolm, an eye, ear, no, and throat specialist in Baltimore, for advice. He subquently put them in touch with Alexander Graham Bell, who was working with deaf children at the time. Bell advid the couple to contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind, the school where Bridgman had been educated, which was then located in South Boston. Michael Anaganos, the school's director, asked former student Anne Sullivan, herlf visually impaired and then only 20 years old, to become Keller's instructor. It was the beginning of a 49-year-long relationship, eventually evolving into governess and then eventual companion. Anne Sullivan arrived at Keller's hou in March 1887, and immedia
tely began to teach Helen to communicate by spelling words into her hand, beginning with d-o-l-l for the doll that she had brought Keller as a prent. Keller's big breakthrough in
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communication came in April the same year, when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on the palm of her hand, while running cool water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of "water"; she then nearly exhausted Sullivan demanding the names of all the other familiar objects in her world. Formal education Starting in May, 1888, Keller attended the Perkins Institute for the Blind. In 1894, Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan moved to New York to attend the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf and Horace Mann School for the Deaf. In 1896, they returned to Massachutts and Keller entered The Cambridge School for Young Ladies before gaining admittance, in 1900, to Radcliffe College. Her admirer, Mark Twain, had introduced her to Standard Oil magnate
Henry Huttleston Rogers, who, with his wife, paid for her education. In 1904, at the age of 24, Keller graduated from Radcliffe, becoming the first deaf blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. Companions Anne Sullivan stayed as a companion to Helen Keller long after she taught her. Anne married John Macy in 1905, and her health started failing around 1914. Polly Thompson was hired to keep hou. She was a young woman from Scotland who didn't have experience with deaf or blind people. She progresd to working as a cretary as well, and eventually became a constant companion to Keller. Keller moved to Forest Hills, Queens together with Anne and John, and ud the hou as a ba for her efforts on behalf of American Foundation for the Blind. Their home there was robbed multiple times, and had been robbed four times by June 1921. After Anne died in 1936, Keller and Thompson moved to Connecticut. They travelled worldwide raising funding for the blind. Thompson had a stroke in 1957 from which she never fully recovered, and died in 1960. Winnie Corbally, a nur who was originally brought in to care for Polly Thompson in 1957, stayed on after Thompson's death and was Keller's companion for the rest of her life. Writings One of Keller's earliest pieces of writing, at the
age of eleven, was The Frost King (1891). There were allegations that this story had been plagiarized from The Frost Fairies by Margaret Canby. An investigation into the matter revealed that Keller may have experienced a ca of cryptomnesia, which was that she had Canby's story read to her but forgot about it, while the memory remained in her subconscious.
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At the age of 22, Keller published her autobiography, The Story of My Life (1903), with help from Sullivan and Sullivan's husband, John Macy. It includes words that Keller wrote and the story of her life up to age 21, and was written during her time in college. Keller wrote The World I Live In in 1908 giving readers an insight into how she felt about the world. Out of the Dark, a ries of essays on Socialism, was published in 1913. Her spiritual autobiography, My Religion, was published in 1927 and re-issued as Light in my Darkness. It advocates the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, the controversial mystic
who gives a spiritual interpretation of the Last Judgment and cond coming of Jesus Christ, and the movement named after him, Swedenborgianism. Keller wrote a total of 12 published books and veral articles.
