biography of helen keller

HELEN KELLER&

ANNE SULLIVAN

• Born in June 27, 1880• When she was 19 months

old, she contracted an illness which made her blind and deaf.

• In 1886, her mother, Kate Adams, inspired by the successful education of another deaf-blind woman in Charles Dickens' American Notes.

• Alexander Graham Bell, who was working with deaf children at the time, advised Keller's parents to contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind.

• Michael Anagnos, the school's director, asked 20-year-old former student Anne Sullivan to become Keller's instructor.• It was the beginning of a

49-year-long relationship.

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.

Keller wrote a total of 12 published books and several articles.

-The Frost King (1891),-The Story of My Life (1903),-The World I Live In (1908),-Out of The Dark (1913),-My Religion (1927) are some of those books.

Keller's life has been interpreted many times.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.

On September 14, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the United States' two highest civilian honors. In 1965 she was elected to the National Women's Hall of Fame at the New York World's Fair. 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.