During that time, Keller’s political awareness heightened. Sullivan married Harvard instructor and social critic John Macy in 1905, and Keller lived with them. She authored a dozen books and articles in major magazines, advocating for prevention of blindness in children and for other causes. (Impressed by Keller, Mark Twain urged his wealthy friend Henry Rogers to finance her education.)Įven before she graduated, Keller published two books, The Story of My Life (1902) and Optimism (1903), which launched her career as a writer and lecturer. Sullivan went with her, helping Keller with her studies. With Sullivan’s tutoring, Keller was admitted to Radcliffe College, graduating cum laude in 1904. At fourteen, she went to New York for two years where she improved her speaking ability, and then returned to Massachusetts to attend the Cambridge School for Young Ladies. A year later, Sullivan brought Keller to the Perkins School in Boston, where she learned to read Braille and write with a specially made typewriter.

She used touch to teach Keller the alphabet and to make words by spelling them with her finger on Keller’s palm. Although Helen initially resisted her, Sullivan persevered. Ultimately, she was referred to Anne Sullivan, a graduate of the Perkins School for the Blind, who became Keller’s lifelong teacher and mentor. Recognizing her daughter’s intelligence, Keller’s mother sought help from experts including inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who had become involved with deaf children.

She had no formal education until age seven, and since she could not speak, she developed a system for communicating with her family by feeling their facial expressions. Keller, a farmer, newspaper editor, and Confederate Army veteran, and his second wife Katherine Adams Keller, an educated woman from Memphis. Several months before Helen’s second birthday, a serious illness-possibly meningitis or scarlet fever-left her deaf and blind. She advocated for the blind and for women’s suffrage and co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union.īorn on Jin Tuscumbia, Alabama, Keller was the older of two daughters of Arthur H. Undeterred by deafness and blindness, Helen Keller rose to become a major 20 th century humanitarian, educator and writer.

The life of helen keller story