Helen Keller : She was an American lecturer and writer who overcame severe physical disabilities, inspiring many other people to similar accomplishments. Deaf and blind from the age of 19 months, Keller learned to communicate with the help of her teacher, Anne Sullivan. Sullivan taught Keller to read Braille and to “listen” by feeling a speaker’s face. Keller graduated from Radcliffe College in 1904 and authored a number of books about her experiences.
Helen Keller (1880-1968 was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama, the daughter of well-to-do parents: Arthur Keller, a former officer in the Confederate army, and Kate Adams. When 19 months old, Helen was stricken with an acute illness that left her deaf and blind. In a short time, she forgot the few words she knew and became silent. She made use of signs to get what she wanted, but when her parents or the family servants did not understand her, her frustration found an outlet in screaming and tantrums. In the 1880s people who were both deaf and blind were classified in law as idiots.
A doctor who examined Keller, however, thought that her intelligence could be developed. On the advice of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor, who was also a teacher of deaf people, Keller’s parents got a teacher for the Blind. The teacher’s name was Anne Mansfield Sullivan (later Macy). Thus began an association that lasted until Sullivan’s death in 1936.
Sullivan’s first task was to break through the barrier of darkness and silence that surrounded the child.
She succeeded in that. Two years later she was reading and writing fluently using the Braille system. When Keller was tert, she begged to relearn how to speak. At first this seemed impossible, but Sullivan discovered that Keller could learn sounds by placing her fingers on her teacher’s larynx and sensing the vibrations. The moving account of how Sullivan taught her to speak is told in Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life (1902).
In 1900, Keller entered Radcliffe College. Four years later she graduated with honors to worldwide acclaim and decided to devote her life to helping blind and deaf people. Through her essays and articles in major magazines and newspapers, Keller explained the problems encountered by people who are deaf and blind and the responsibilities of society. In addition to The Story of My Life, she published Optimism, or My Key to Life (1903), The World I Live In (1908), and Out of the Dark (1913).
In her desire to help people like her, Keller also began to travel and lecture throughout the world, enlisting the aid of many famous people she met. Philanthropist Andrew Carnegie gave her an annual income, writers Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson sang her praises, and nearly every U.S. president of her time invited her to the White House. She received many honors. Helen Keller is one of the best examples of people who have overcome severe handicaps and become world famous.
