Helen Keller was born on this date in 1880. Here are 10 facts about her.
- Helen
Keller was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Her father was the editor of
a local newspaper who had previously served in the Confederate Army
during the US Civil War. One of her ancestors was the first teacher
for the deaf in Zurich. Helen's comment about this coincidence in
her autobiography was "there is no king who has not had a slave
among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his."
- She
wasn't born deaf and blind. She became so at the age of 19 months
after an illness which doctors of the time described as “an acute
congestion of the stomach and the brain”. It's thought what she
had was probably Scarlet Fever or Meningitis, both treatable
nowadays. As Helen started to recover, her parents realised he had
lost her sight and hearing.
- She
narrowly escaped being placed in an institution. As a small child
she was prone to tantrums and erratic behaviour, and some of her
relatives recommended she be hospitalised. Luckily for Helen, her
parents didn't want to do that. Instead, they took her to Julian
John Chisolm, Professor of Diseases of the Eye and Ear at the
University of Maryland. He recommended that she see a man who had
had founded schools for deaf children as his wife was deaf. The man
was Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone. He suggested
she went to a school for the blind. It was through the school that
she met Anne Sullivan, who was mentored by Bell. The three became
lifelong friends.
- Anne
became Helen's teacher on March 3, 1887. Helen would later describe
this as the day her life changed and her "soul was born".
Anne, visually impaired herself, had only just graduated from
school. She famously began teaching Helen words by spelling them out
on her palm. It didn't look as if it was going to work, at first, as
Anne used objects like a doll and a mug, but when Anne famously took
Helen outside and held her hand under the Water pump while spelling
“w-a-t-e-r” into Helen’s palm, Helen got the message and asked
for the word for "earth". She went on to learn 30 words
that day.
- She
was the first deaf-blind person to graduate from college. Anne would
attend with her to interpret the lectures and texts. She wrote her
autobiography during her junior year.
- Helen
wrote 14 books and 500 articles during her life, but she only had
one attempt at writing fiction, when she was eleven. She wrote a
short story called The Frost King, which was published in her
school's magazine and a journal on deaf-blind education. When
someone pointed out the similarities between Helen's story and
another called Frost Fairies by Margaret Canby, Helen was
accused of plagiarism and interrogated by her teachers for two
hours. Although it was finally decided by a narrow vote that Helen
had not deliberately copied the story, she never wrote fiction
again. It's thought Helen may have had Canby's story read to her at
some stage and although she'd forgotten it, it was still there in
her subconscious.
- Another
of her lifelong friends was Mark Twain, who she met at the age of
14. She wrote that "he treated me not as a freak, but as a
handicapped woman seeking a way to circumvent extraordinary
difficulties.” She would recognise him by his scent, for, as a
smoker, he often smelled of tobacco. It was Mark Twain who convinced
the industrialist Henry Huttleston Rogers to help pay for Keller’s
education, and he was also the first person to call Anne Sullivan a
miracle worker.
- When
she was 36, she fell in love and almost married. Peter Fagan worked
as Helen's secretary for a while when Anne Sullivan was ill. They
secretly got engaged, took out a marriage licence and tried to elope
three times. Her family, believing only they could look after her
properly, and that she might pass on her disabilities to any
children she had, forbade her to marry. “If I could see, I would
marry first of all,” she wrote.
- She
had political views way ahead of her time. She belonged to the
Socialist Party, helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU), supported industrial workers’ rights, women’s suffrage,
birth control (she expressed concerns about human overpopulation),
and refusing life-saving medical procedures to infants with severe
disabilities. She was also an admirer of Vladimir Lenin. Her left
wing views resulted in her being investigated by the FBI. She
travelled the world advocating for rights and education for deaf,
blind and disabled people - she visited 39 countries and met with
world leaders. She was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 1953. In
the 1920s, she even went on tour of the Vaudeville circuit, where
she would, with Anne's help, speak to audiences and answer their
questions.
- She
learned to communicate, not only by means of spelling words on
palms, but by touching people's lips, reading Braille, and typing.
She learned to speak, but never liked her voice as her speech was
hard for others to understand. She even found a way to appreciate Music, by placing her fingertips on a resonant tabletop.
I've listed the themes each novel touches on here for easy reference.
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