Helen Keller Biography and Works.

An author, political activist and lecturer, Helen Keller was the first deaf and blind person to be a graduate. Her life is an example of how perseverance can overcome obstacles.

Helen Keller was born on June 27, 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama.

When she was one year and seven months old, she suffered from fever, assumed to be scarlet fever that left her deaf and blind. She was recommended to the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston by Alexander Graham Bell.

She met her teacher, Anne Sullivan in the Perkins Institute. Sullivan discovered a unique way to teach Helen words and their meanings. She once held Helen’s hand under the flowing water. As the water fell on her hand, Sullivan wrote the alphabets of the word, ‘water’ one by one on her arm. Helen tried to grasp every motion felt on her arm and realized that the substance falling on her hand was called ‘water’.

Sullivan’s teaching abilities and Helen’s will to learn helped her to pass examinations, learn five languages and write twelve books, including her autobiography, “The Story of My Life’.

She was involved in campaigns for women’s rights at her college level, which laid the foundation for her as a socialist. Helen also wrote articles for The Masses’, a socialist journal. She devoted her life and travelled around the world to raise funds for the American Foundation of the Blind.

Helen Keller died in Westport, Connecticut, on June 1, 1968.

Trivia

Helen had a protruding left eye, due to which she was usually photographed in profile. Both her eyes were later replaced with glass eyes for ‘medical and cosmetic reasons.

Quote

“I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a man-made world.”