Helen Keller

Born June 27, 1880, Tuscumbia, Alabama, author, lecturer and social activist Helen Keller promoted social reforms to improve the education and treatment of handicapped individuals. She died June 1, 1968, in Westport, Connecticut.

Keller, Helen Adams (June 27, 1880 - June 1, 1968), author and lecturer, was born in Tuscumbia, Ala., the daughter of Arthur H. Keller, a gentleman farmer and former captain in the Confederate army, and Kate Adams. In her nineteenth month, she suffered a high fever (never properly diagnosed) that left her deaf and blind. Until she was seven years old, Keller had no formal instruction. She did not speak, read, or write. She devised a number of manual signs to communicate with her family and developed a large repertoire of antisocial behaviors. Her parents, on learning of Samuel Gridley Howe's success years before with another deaf-blind girl, Laura Bridgman, contacted the Perkins Institution for the Blind. In 1887, Michael Anagnos, who had succeeded Howe as director at Perkins, recommended a recent graduate, Anne Sullivan, to become Keller's tutor.

Sullivan, who arrived at the Keller home in March 1887, applied Howe's methods with her own variations. Like Howe, she communicated by spelling in her pupil's hand; unlike Howe, she used naturally occurring situations in place of invented lessons and, in the beginning, insisted on strict discipline as a prerequisite for instruction. Because Keller made astonishing progress--within a month she learned the manual alphabet and that everything had a name--Sullivan earned the sobriquet "the Miracle Worker."