Helen Keller was born with the ability to see and hear. At the age of just 18 months she contracted an illness that would not only leave her deaf and blind, but an outsider to the world. She created her own way of communication connecting with the cooks daughter Martha. By the age of seven she had more than 30 home signs to communicate with her family. She developed a 49 year long friendship with her Mentor Anne Sullivan. Her big breakthrough came when she realised the motions Anne was making in her hand meant water as cold water poured over her arm. She would go on to make history and an amazing impact on the world.
"He treated me not as a freak, but as a person dealing with great difficulties". Mark Twain was a big admirer of Helen Keller and they had a long friendship. Mark Twain had declared that the two most important figures of the twentieth century were Helen Keller and Napoleon Bonaparte. Mark Twain was also the first person to refer to Miss Anne Sullivan as the 'Miracle Worker'. In his autobiography the last words are a quote from Helen saying "You once told me that you were a pessimist Mr. Clemons, but great men are usually mistaken about themselves. You are an Optimist."
Alexander Graham Bell who despite having achieved world wide fame was working with deaf children. When Mrs. Keller was searching for a doctor to assist her daughter they were referred to Mr. Bell. After hearing from Miss Sullivan the day after her breakthrough with Helen Alexander began to spread word of this accomplishment, publishing accounts in several journals and before long Helen had become somewhat of a celebrity. He went on to pay for her schooling and become life long friends. Helen later published a novel title The Story of My Life and dedicated it to him.
Starting in May 1888, Keller attended the Perkins Institute for the Blind. In 1894, Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan moved to New York to attend the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf, and to learn from Sarah Fuller at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf. In 1896, they returned to Massachusetts, and Keller entered The Cambridge School for Young Ladies before gaining admittance, in 1900, to Radcliffe College, where she lived in Briggs Hall, South House. Her admirer, Mark Twain, had introduced her to Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleston Rogers, who, with his wife Abbie, paid for her education. In 1904, at the age of 24, Keller graduated from Radcliffe. She maintained a correspondence with the Austrian philosopher and pedagogue Wilhelm Jerusalem, who was one of the first to discover her literary talent.
Determined to communicate with others as conventionally as possible, Keller learned to speak, and spent much of her life giving speeches and lectures. She learned to "hear" people's speech by reading their lips with her hands—her sense of touch had become extremely subtle. She became proficient at using braille and reading sign language with her hands as well. Shortly before World War I, with the assistance of the Zoellner Quartet she determined that by placing her fingertips on a resonant tabletop she could experience music played close by.
On September 14, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded Helen Keller the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the United States' highest two civilian honors. In 1965 she was elected to the Women's Hall of Fame at the New YorkWorld's Fair.
Anne Sullivan stayed as a companion to Helen Keller long after she taught her. Anne married John Macy in 1905, and her health started failing around 1914. Polly Thomson was hired to keep house. She was a young woman from Scotland who had no experience with deaf or blind people. She progressed to working as a secretary as well, and eventually became a constant companion to Keller. Keller moved to Forest Hills, Queens, together with Anne and John, and used the house as a base for her efforts on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind. "While in her thirties Helen had a love affair, became secretly engaged, and defied her teacher and family by attempting an elopement with the man she loved." He was "Peter Fagan, a young Boston Herald reporter who was sent to Helen's home to act as her private secretary when lifelong companion, Anne, fell ill."
Anne Sullivan died in 1936 after a coma, with Keller holding her hand. Keller and Thomson moved to Connecticut. They traveled worldwide and raised funds for the blind. Thomson had a stroke in 1957 from which she never fully recovered, and died in 1960. Winnie Corbally, a nurse whom they originally hired to care for Thomson in 1957, stayed on after her death and was Keller's companion for the rest of her life
When Keller visited Akita Prefecture in Japan in July 1937, she inquired about Hachikō, the famed Akita dog that had died in 1935. She told a Japanese person that she would like to have an Akita dog; one was given to her within a month, with the name of Kamikaze-go. When he died of canine distemper, his older brother, Kenzan-go, was presented to her as an official gift from the Japanese government in July 1938. Keller is credited with having introduced the Akita to the United States through these two dogs.
By 1939, a breed standard had been established, and dog shows had been held, but such activities stopped after World War II began. Keller wrote in the Akita Journal: If ever there was an angel in fur, it was Kamikaze. I know I shall never feel quite the same tenderness for any other pet. The Akita dog has all the qualities that appeal to me – he is gentle, companionable and trusty.
Keller suffered a series of strokes in 1961 and spent the last years of her life at her home. Keller devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind. She died in her sleep on June 1, 1968, at her home, Arcan Ridge, located in Easton, Connecticut, a few weeks short of her eighty-eighth birthday. A service was held in her honor at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., her body was cremated and her ashes were placed there next to her constant companions, Anne Sullivan and Polly Thomson. She was buried at the Washington National Cathedral.
In 1999, Keller was listed in Gallup's Most Widely Admired People of the 20th Century. In 2003, Alabama honored its native daughter on its state quarter. The Helen Keller Hospital in Sheffield, Alabama is dedicated to her. There is a street named after Helen Keller in Getafe, Spain. In 1984, Helen Keller's life story was made into a TV movie called The Miracle Continues. In 1955 Helen won an Academy Award for her performance in a documentary on her life 'Helen Keller in Her Story'.
Keller's life has been interpreted many times. She appeared in a silent film, Deliverance (1919), which told her story in a melodramatic, allegorical style. She was also the subject of the documentaries Helen Keller in Her Story, narrated by Katharine Cornell, and 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 derived from her autobiography, The Story of My Life. The various dramas each describe the relationship between Keller and Sullivan, depicting how the teacher led her from a state of almost feral wildness into education, activism, and intellectual celebrity. The common title of the cycle echoes Mark Twain's description of Sullivan as a "miracle worker." Its first realization was the 1957 Playhouse 90 teleplay of that title by William Gibson. He adapted 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.
In 1984, Keller's life story was made into a TV movie called The Miracle Continues. This film that entailed the semi-sequel to The Miracle Worker recounts her college years and her early adult life. None of the early movies hint at the social activism that would become the hallmark of Keller's later life, although a Disney version produced in 2000 states in the credits that she became an activist for social equality.
The Bollywood movie Black (2005) was largely based on Keller's story, from her childhood to her graduation.
A documentary called Shining Soul: Helen Keller's Spiritual Life and Legacy was produced by the Swedenborg Foundation in the same year. The film focuses on the role played by Emanuel Swedenborg's spiritual theology in her life and how it inspired Keller's triumph over her triple disabilities of blindness, deafness and a severe speech impediment.
On March 6, 2008, the New England Historic Genealogical Society announced that a staff member had discovered a rare 1888 photograph showing Helen and Anne, which, although previously published, had escaped widespread attention. Depicting Helen holding one of her many dolls, it is believed to be the earliest surviving photograph of Anne Sullivan Macy.
Video footage showing Helen Keller learning to mimic speech sounds also exists. A biography of Helen Keller was written by the German Jewish author H.J.Kaeser.
Helen briefly worked the Vaudeville circus circuit. Telling her story with Anne interpreting. The Q&A sessions allowed people to grasp her intelligence and humour.
She was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 1953. The nomination came after Keller visited the Mideast in 1952 and met with local leaders to advocate for the rights of those who were blind or disabled. She secured a promise from Egypt’s Minister of Education to create secondary schools for the blind that could lead to a college education. The legacy of Keller’s visit also lives on in Israel, in Jerusalem’s Helen Keller School, which was renamed in her honour.