Born on June 27, 1880, near Tuscumbia, Alabama, Helen Keller was afflicted at the age of 19 months with an illness (possibly scarlet fever) that left her blind, deaf, and mute. She was examined by Alexander Graham Bell at the age of six; as a result he sent to her a twenty-year-old teacher, Anne Sullivan (Macy) from the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston, which Bell╒s son-in-law directed. Sullivan, a remarkable teacher, remained with Helen from March 1887 until her death in October 1936.
Within months Helen had learned to feel objects and associate them with words spelled out by finger signals on her palm, to read sentences by feeling raised words on cardboard, and to make her own sentences by arranging words in a frame. During 1888╨1890 she spent winters in Boston at the Perkins Institution learning Braille. Then she began a slow process of learning to speak╤feeling the position of the tongue and lips, making sounds, and imitating the lip and tongue motions╤under Sarah Fuller of the Horace Mann School for the Deaf in Boston. She also learned to lip-read by placing her fingers on the lips and throat of the speaker while the words were simultaneously spelled out for her. At fourteen she enrolled in the Wright╨Humason School for the Deaf in New York City, and at sixteen she entered the Cambridge School for Young Ladies in Massachusetts. She won admission to Radcliffe College in 1900 and graduated cum laude in 1904.
Having developed skills never approached by any person so handicapped, Keller began to write of blindness, a subject then taboo in women╒s magazines because of the relationship of many cases to venereal disease. The pioneering editor Edward W. Bok accepted her articles for the Ladies╒ Home Journal, and other major magazines╤The Century, McClure╒s, and the Atlantic Monthly╤followed suit.
She wrote of her life in several books, including The Story of My Life, 1902, Optimism, 1903, The World I Live In, 1908, Song of the Stone Wall, 1910, Out of the Dark, 1913, My Religion, 1927, Midstream, 1929, We Bereaved, 1929, Peace at Eventide, 1932, Helen Keller╒s Journal, 1938, Let Us Have Faith, 1940, Teacher: Anne Sullivan Macy, 1955, and The Open Door, 1957. In 1913 she began lecturing, primarily on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind, for which she later established a $2 million endowment fund, and her lecture tours took her several times around the world. Her efforts to improve treatment of the deaf and the blind were influential in removing the handicapped from asylums. She also prompted the organization of commissions for the blind in 30 states by 1937. Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963, she died in Westport, Connecticut, on June 1, 1968, universally acknowledged as one of the great women of the world.
Movie: In the 1960 documentary ╥In Her Story,╙ Keller experiences modern dance with Martha Graham and other dancers at Graham╒s studio.
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