Helen Keller

Helen Adams Keller (born in Tuscumbia, Alabama, in 1880; died in Easton, Connecticut, in 1968) was an American author, lecturer and political activist who lost both sight and hearing in early childhood. She wrote in English, and her life spanned much of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She matters because she was the first deafblind person in the United States to earn a college degree, and because her story remains a reference point for how deafblind people are taught.

At nineteen months old, an illness left her unable to see or hear. Doctors of the time called it an acute congestion of the stomach and brain, while later specialists have suggested meningitis, scarlet fever or other infections. Until the age of seven she communicated mostly through a set of home signs, more than sixty of them, and her frustration often turned into violent outbursts. The family farm, Ivy Green, in Tuscumbia, was the setting of those early years.

In March 1887, Anne Sullivan arrived at the Keller home. Sullivan had been trained at the Perkins Institute for the Blind and was herself visually impaired. She began spelling words into Keller's palm, and the turning point came when Keller understood that the motions traced on one hand, while cold water ran over the other, meant water. Sullivan stayed by her side for nearly fifty years, until her death in 1936. Keller studied at specialist and mainstream schools and then at Radcliffe College, graduating in 1904 as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She learned to speak, read braille and, through the Tadoma method, to follow speech by touching the speaker's lips and throat.

Keller wrote more than a dozen books along with many essays and speeches. Her autobiography, The Story of My Life (1903), describes her education with Sullivan in plain and reflective prose. Later books, such as Light in My Darkness (1927), returned to her inner life and to the wider questions of disability, society and the meaning of experience. Her subjects ranged from animals to public affairs.

She was also an activist. She joined the Socialist Party in the first decade of the twentieth century and wrote for the Industrial Workers of the World between 1916 and 1918. In 1920 she helped found the American Civil Liberties Union, and she spoke for women's suffrage, workers' rights and world peace. She raised money for the American Foundation for the Blind. In 1924 she stepped back from politics to concentrate on the rights of people with disabilities, and she gave lectures around the world until 1957.

Her legacy has several strands. In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her life has also inspired stage and screen works, most famously William Gibson's play The Miracle Worker (1959), adapted for film in 1962. Since 1980, under a decree signed by President Jimmy Carter, her birthday has been marked as Helen Keller Day. Her name is still tied to the education and inclusion of deafblind people.