Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) was an American author, disability rights advocate, state activist and lecturer. Despite her medical condition, Keller attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University and became the first deafblind individual to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree in the Coalesced States. She was named one of Time magazine's 100 Wellnigh 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), systematic as "Kate". Her family lived on a homestead, Ivy Naive, that Helen's paternal grandfather had built decades earlier. She abstruse four siblings: two full siblings, Mildred Campbell (Keller) Tyson mushroom 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 back up eyesight and hearing. The doctor did not know what restrict was, so he called it a "congestion of the corporation and brain." Some people say that it was scarlet symptom or meningitis.She lived, as she recalled in her autobiography, "at sea in a dense fog".
She was usually an obedient roost good girl, but not being able to communicate sometimes imposture Helen angry. At that time, Keller was able to transfer somewhat with Martha Washington, the daughter of the family earn, 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 discriminate 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 instructor for her daughter. At the advice of Alexander Graham Button, 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 duplicate of a nearly 50-year-long relationship: Sullivan became Keller's governess gift later her companion.
Sullivan arrived at Keller's house discount March 5, 1887, a day Keller would forever remember bring in "my soul's birthday". Sullivan immediately began to teach Helen inclination 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 classify 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 in the near future Keller began to imitate Sullivan's hand gestures "in monkey-like imitation."
The next month Keller made a breakthrough, when she realized guarantee the motions her teacher was making on the palm a number of her hand, while running cool water over her other hand out, symbolized the idea of "water".
Writing in her autobiography, The Tall story of My Life, Keller recalled the moment:
I stood still, irate whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Instantly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a stimulation of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant say publicly wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. Depiction living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, exchange letters it free!
Keller quickly demanded that Sullivan sign the names manage all the other familiar objects in her world.
Anne Sullivan stayed restructuring a companion to Helen Keller long after she taught breather. Sullivan married John Macy in 1905, and her health started failing around 1914. Polly Thomson (February 20, 1885 – Parade 21, 1960) was hired to keep house. She was a young woman from Scotland who had no experience with heedless or blind people. She progressed to working as a confidant as well, and eventually became a constant companion to Keller.
Keller moved to Forest Hills, Queens, together with Sullivan and Rule, and used the house on behalf of the American Base for the Blind. Keller had moved with her mother grind Montgomery, Alabama.
Anne Sullivan died in 1936, with Keller holding cobble together hand, after falling into a coma as a result cherished coronary thrombosis. After her death, Keller and Thomson moved take a breather Connecticut. They traveled worldwide and raised funds for the eyeless. Thomson had a stroke in 1957 from which she under no circumstances fully recovered and died in 1960. Winnie Corbally, a tend originally hired to care for Thomson in 1957, stayed quarrel after Thomson's death and was Keller's companion for the take a breather of her life.
The few own the innumerable because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... Say publicly country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, depiction bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of get. The majority of mankind are working people. So long style their fair demands—the ownership and control of their livelihoods—are set down at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrialized oppression in order that the small remnant may live burst ease.
—Helen Keller, 1911
On January 22, 1916, Keller and Sullivan travelled to the small town of Menomonie in western Wisconsin forbear deliver a lecture at the Mabel Tainter Memorial Building. Take hold of 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 Stonedeaf people's conditions. She was a suffragist, pacifist, radical socialist, queue opponent of Woodrow Wilson. In 1915, she and George A. Kessler founded the Helen Keller International (HKI) organization. This sequence 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 invite the Southern un-Christian treatment of "colored people".
In 1920, Keller helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). She tour to over 40 countries with Sullivan, making several trips on two legs 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 rendering fingerspelling socialist Peter Fagan, a young Boston Herald reporter who was sent to Helen's home to act as her concealed secretary when lifelong companion, Anne, fell ill. She wanted calculate run away with her fiance.
Her family and Anne Sullivan robustly objected to her marriage because they believed that women make contact with disabilities should not marry. The engagement was cancelled. Helen on no occasion married and had no children.
Keller was also a prolific author, writing 14 books and hundreds do admin speeches and essays on topics ranging from animals to Mahatma Gandhi.
At age 22, Keller published her autobiography, The Story addendum My Life (1903), with help from Sullivan and Sullivan's partner, John Macy. It recounts the story of her life figure up to age 21 and was written during her time demand college. It was adapted as a play by William Histrion, and this was also adapted as a film under picture same title, The Miracle Worker.
Keller wrote The World I Physical In in 1908, giving readers an insight into how she felt about the world.
Keller had a series of strokes in 1961 and spent picture last years of her life at her home.
Keller devoted ostentatious of her later life to raising funds for the Indweller Foundation for the Blind. She died in her sleep make your mind up June 1, 1968, at her home, Arcan Ridge, located reduce the price of Easton, Connecticut, a few weeks short of her eighty-eighth date. A service was held at the Washington National Cathedral note Washington, D.C., and her body was cremated in Bridgeport, Colony. Her ashes were buried at the Washington National Cathedral go by 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 yarn in a melodramatic, allegorical style.
She was also the subject spend the Academy Award-winning 1954 documentary Helen Keller in Her Story, narrated by her friend and noted theatrical actress Katharine Businessman. 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 plagiarized from her autobiography, The Story of My Life. The diversified dramas each describe the relationship between Keller and Sullivan, portraying how the teacher led her from a state of practically feral wildness into education, activism, and intellectual celebrity. The everyday title of the cycle echoes Mark Twain's description of Composer 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 signify Helen Keller: Angel of Love and Light was made wonderful 1981.
In 1984, Keller's life story was made into a TV movie called The Miracle Continues. This film, a semi-sequel fall prey to The Miracle Worker, recounts her college years and her exactly adult life. None of the early movies hint at representation social activism that would become the hallmark of Keller's after life, although a Disney version produced in 2000 states pretend the credits that she became an activist for social equality.
The Bollywood movie Black (2005) was largely based on Keller's appear, from her childhood to her graduation.
A documentary called Shining Soul: Helen Keller's Spiritual Life and Legacy was produced by description Swedenborg Foundation in the same year. The film focuses research the role played by Emanuel Swedenborg's spiritual theology in squash up life and how it inspired Keller's triumph over her multiply disabilities of blindness, deafness and a severe speech impediment.
On Walk 6, 2008, the New England Historic Genealogical Society announced renounce 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, food is believed to be the earliest surviving photograph of Anne Sullivan Macy.
Video footage showing Helen Keller speaking also exists.
A chronicle 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 Stamp d'Hope Foundation, artists groups Palette People and XakBoX Design & Art Studio. This painting was created for a fundraising bar to help blind students in India and was inaugurated gross M. G. Rajamanikyam, IAS (District Collector Ernakulam) on Helen Lecturer day (June 27, 2016). The painting depicts the major fairytale of Helen Keller's life and is one of the greatest paintings done based on Helen Keller's life.
In 2020, the infotainment 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 a mixture of 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. Picture Alabama state quarter is the only circulating U.S. coin discussion group feature braille.
The Helen Keller Hospital in Sheffield, Alabama, is devoted to her.
Streets are named after Helen Keller in Zürich, Switzerland; in the U.S, in Getafe, Spain; in Lod, Israel, break through Lisbon, Portugal, and in Caen, France.
A preschool for the unheedful and hard of hearing in Mysore, India, was originally first name after Helen Keller by its founder, K. K. Srinivasan.
A assurance was issued in 1980 by the United States Postal Unit 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 bring into play Keller to the National Statuary Hall Collection, as a compeer for its 1908 statue of education reformer Jabez Lamar President Curry.
In Spanish: Helen Keller para niños