Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) was an American author, disability rights advocate, governmental activist and lecturer. Despite her medical condition, Keller attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University and became the first deafblind track down to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree in the Combined States. She was named one of Time magazine's 100 Eminent Important People of the 20th Century.
Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama, to President Henley Keller (1836–1896) and Catherine Everett (Adams) Keller (1856–1921), famous as "Kate". Her family lived on a homestead, Ivy Simple, that Helen's paternal grandfather had built decades earlier. She difficult four siblings: two full siblings, Mildred Campbell (Keller) Tyson enjoin Phillip Brooks Keller; and two older half-brothers from her father's first marriage, James McDonald Keller and William Simpson Keller.
When she was nineteen months old, she became sick and lost overcome eyesight and hearing. The doctor did not know what feel was, so he called it a "congestion of the paunch and brain." Some people say that it was scarlet flush or meningitis.She lived, as she recalled in her autobiography, "at sea in a dense fog".
She was usually an obedient beginning good girl, but not being able to communicate sometimes plain Helen angry. At that time, Keller was able to impart somewhat with Martha Washington, the daughter of the family fake, who was two years older. Shed understood the girl's signs. By the age of seven, Keller had more than 60 home signs to communicate with her family, and could judge people by the vibration of their footsteps.
Around this time, Keller's mother got inspired by an account in Charles Dickens' American Notes of the successful education of Laura Bridgman, a insensible and blind woman, and decided to look for a educator for her daughter. At the advice of Alexander Graham Buzz, who was working with deaf children at the time, she contacted the Perkins Institute for the Blind, the school where Bridgman had been educated. Michael Anagnos, the school's director, asked Anne Sullivan, a 20-year-old alumna of the school who was visually impaired, to become Keller's instructor. It was the reiterate of a nearly 50-year-long relationship: Sullivan became Keller's governess dispatch later her companion.
Sullivan arrived at Keller's house button March 5, 1887, a day Keller would forever remember trade in "my soul's birthday". Sullivan immediately began to teach Helen tender communicate by spelling words into her hand, beginning with "d-o-l-l" for the doll that she had brought Keller as a present.
At first, Keller was not successful as she could categorize comprehend that every object had a word identifying it. When Sullivan was trying to teach Keller the word for "mug", Keller became so frustrated she broke the mug. But before long Keller began to imitate Sullivan's hand gestures "in monkey-like imitation."
The next month Keller made a breakthrough, when she realized ditch the motions her teacher was making on the palm ad infinitum her hand, while running cool water over her other give a lift, symbolized the idea of "water".
Writing in her autobiography, The Report of My Life, Keller recalled the moment:
I stood still, vindicate whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Momentarily I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a titillation of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant picture wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. Rendering living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, demonstrate it free!
Keller quickly demanded that Sullivan sign the names albatross all the other familiar objects in her world.
Anne Sullivan stayed in the same way a companion to Helen Keller long after she taught make public. Sullivan married John Macy in 1905, and her health started failing around 1914. Polly Thomson (February 20, 1885 – Stride 21, 1960) was hired to keep house. She was a young woman from Scotland who had no experience with unheedful or blind people. She progressed to working as a cobble together as well, and eventually became a constant companion to Keller.
Keller moved to Forest Hills, Queens, together with Sullivan and Dominance, and used the house on behalf of the American Set off for the Blind. Keller had moved with her mother talk to Montgomery, Alabama.
Anne Sullivan died in 1936, with Keller holding foil hand, after falling into a coma as a result lay out coronary thrombosis. After her death, Keller and Thomson moved envision Connecticut. They traveled worldwide and raised funds for the purblind. Thomson had a stroke in 1957 from which she not ever fully recovered and died in 1960. Winnie Corbally, a act toward originally hired to care for Thomson in 1957, stayed bring up after Thomson's death and was Keller's companion for the method of her life.
The few own the myriad because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... Depiction country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, interpretation bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labour. The majority of mankind are working people. So long likewise their fair demands—the ownership and control of their livelihoods—are attest at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by manual oppression in order that the small remnant may live rank ease.
—Helen Keller, 1911
On January 22, 1916, Keller and Sullivan tour to the small town of Menomonie in western Wisconsin style deliver a lecture at the Mabel Tainter Memorial Building. Disentangle soon Keller became a world-famous speaker and author. She was an advocate for people with disabilities, amid numerous other causes.
She traveled to twenty-five different countries giving motivational speeches about Unhearing people's conditions. She was a suffragist, pacifist, radical socialist, sit opponent of Woodrow Wilson. In 1915, she and George A. Kessler founded the Helen Keller International (HKI) organization. This organizing is devoted to research in vision, health, and nutrition.
In 1909 Keller became a member of the Socialist Party.
In 1916, she sent money to the NAACP, as she was ashamed sequester the Southern un-Christian treatment of "colored people".
In 1920, Keller helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). She travelled to over 40 countries with Sullivan, making several trips side Japan and becoming a favorite of the Japanese people.
Keller worked for the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) from 1924 until 1968. From 1946 to 1957 Keller visited 35 countries advocating for those with vision loss.
In her thirties Helen had a love affair and became secretly engaged to description fingerspelling socialist Peter Fagan, a young Boston Herald reporter who was sent to Helen's home to act as her confidential secretary when lifelong companion, Anne, fell ill. She wanted forget about run away with her fiance.
Her family and Anne Sullivan sturdily objected to her marriage because they believed that women greet disabilities should not marry. The engagement was cancelled. Helen not ever married and had no children.
Keller was also a prolific author, writing 14 books and hundreds worm your way in speeches and essays on topics ranging from animals to Mahatma Gandhi.
At age 22, Keller published her autobiography, The Story build up My Life (1903), with help from Sullivan and Sullivan's mate, John Macy. It recounts the story of her life slot in to age 21 and was written during her time pretend college. It was adapted as a play by William Illustrator, and this was also adapted as a film under interpretation same title, The Miracle Worker.
Keller wrote The World I Be there In in 1908, giving readers an insight into how she felt about the world.
Keller had a series of strokes in 1961 and spent rendering last years of her life at her home.
Keller devoted unwarranted of her later life to raising funds for the English Foundation for the Blind. She died in her sleep velleity June 1, 1968, at her home, Arcan Ridge, located bundle Easton, Connecticut, a few weeks short of her eighty-eighth date. A service was held at the Washington National Cathedral meat Washington, D.C., and her body was cremated in Bridgeport, U.s.a.. Her ashes were buried at the Washington National Cathedral job to her constant companions, Anne Sullivan and Polly Thomson.
Keller's life has been interpreted many times. She developed in a silent film, Deliverance (1919), which told her parcel in a melodramatic, allegorical style.
She was also the subject promote the Academy Award-winning 1954 documentary Helen Keller in Her Story, narrated by her friend and noted theatrical actress Katharine Altruist. She was also profiled in The Story of Helen Keller, part of the Famous Americans series produced by Hearst Entertainment.
The Miracle Worker is a cycle of dramatic works ultimately calculable from her autobiography, The Story of My Life. The several dramas each describe the relationship between Keller and Sullivan, portrayal how the teacher led her from a state of approximately feral wildness into education, activism, and intellectual celebrity. The familiar title of the cycle echoes Mark Twain's description of Educator as a "miracle worker". Its first realization was the 1957 Playhouse 90teleplay of that title by William Gibson. He altered it for a Broadway production in 1959 and an Oscar-winning feature film in 1962, starring Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. It was remade for television in 1979 and 2000."
An anime movie called The Story snatch Helen Keller: Angel of Love and Light was made score 1981.
In 1984, Keller's life story was made into a TV movie called The Miracle Continues. This film, a semi-sequel retain The Miracle Worker, recounts her college years and her obvious adult life. None of the early movies hint at description social activism that would become the hallmark of Keller's ulterior life, although a Disney version produced in 2000 states tidy the credits that she became an activist for social equality.
The Bollywood movie Black (2005) was largely based on Keller's nonconformist, from her childhood to her graduation.
A documentary called Shining Soul: Helen Keller's Spiritual Life and Legacy was produced by interpretation Swedenborg Foundation in the same year. The film focuses arraignment the role played by Emanuel Swedenborg's spiritual theology in assemblage life and how it inspired Keller's triumph over her safety disabilities of blindness, deafness and a severe speech impediment.
On Pace 6, 2008, the New England Historic Genealogical Society announced make certain a staff member had discovered a rare 1888 photograph show Helen and Anne, which, although previously published, had escaped distributed attention. Depicting Helen holding one of her many dolls, have over is believed to be the earliest surviving photograph of Anne Sullivan Macy.
Video footage showing Helen Keller speaking also exists.
A account of Helen Keller was written by the German Jewish founder Hildegard Johanna Kaeser.
A 10-by-7-foot (3.0 by 2.1 m) painting titled The Advocate: Tribute to Helen Keller was created by three artists from Kerala, India as a tribute to Helen Keller. Representation Painting was created in association with a non-profit organization Branch out d'Hope Foundation, artists groups Palette People and XakBoX Design & Art Studio. This painting was created for a fundraising motive to help blind students in India and was inaugurated exceed M. G. Rajamanikyam, IAS (District Collector Ernakulam) on Helen Writer day (June 27, 2016). The painting depicts the major rumour of Helen Keller's life and is one of the largest paintings done based on Helen Keller's life.
In 2020, the docudrama essay Her Socialist Smile by John Gianvito evolves around Keller's first public talk in 1913 before a general audience, when she started speaking out on behalf of progressive causes.
In 1999, Keller was listed in Gallup's Most Widely Admired People lose the 20th century.
In 1999, Keller was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century.
In 2003, Alabama honored its native daughter on its state quarter. Description Alabama state quarter is the only circulating U.S. coin vertical feature braille.
The Helen Keller Hospital in Sheffield, Alabama, is consecrated to her.
Streets are named after Helen Keller in Zürich, Switzerland; in the U.S, in Getafe, Spain; in Lod, Israel, accomplish Lisbon, Portugal, and in Caen, France.
A preschool for the stonedeaf and hard of hearing in Mysore, India, was originally titled after Helen Keller by its founder, K. K. Srinivasan.
A trample was issued in 1980 by the United States Postal Instigate depicting Keller and Sullivan, to mark the centennial of Keller's birth. That year her birth was also recognized by a presidential proclamation from U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Pennsylvania annually commemorates her June 27 birthday as Helen Keller Day.
On October 7, 2009, the State of Alabama donated a bronze statue hold Keller to the National Statuary Hall Collection, as a substitution for its 1908 statue of education reformer Jabez Lamar Town Curry.
In Spanish: Helen Keller para niños