60 Facts About Helen Keller

Helen Adams Keller was an American author, disability rights advocate, political activist and lecturer.

Helen Keller then communicated primarily using home signs until the age of seven, when she met her first teacher and life-long companion Anne Sullivan.

Helen Keller was a prolific author, writing 14 books and hundreds of speeches and essays on topics ranging from animals to Mahatma Gandhi.

Helen Keller campaigned for those with disabilities and for women's suffrage, labor rights, and world peace.

Helen Keller was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Helen Keller's birthplace has been designated and preserved as a National Historic Landmark.

The Helen Keller family lived on a homestead, Ivy Green, which her paternal grandfather had built decades earlier.

Helen Keller had four siblings: two full siblings, Mildred Campbell Tyson and Phillip Brooks Keller; and two older half-brothers from her father's first marriage, James McDonald Keller and William Simpson Keller.

Helen Keller's father worked for many years as an editor of the Tuscumbia North Alabamian.

Helen Keller had served as a captain in the Confederate Army.

Helen Keller's mother was the daughter of Charles W Adams, a Confederate general.

Helen Keller reflected on this fact in her first autobiography, asserting that "there is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his".

At 19 months old, Helen Keller contracted an unknown illness described by doctors as "an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain".

Helen Keller was able to recover from her illness, but was left permanently blind and deaf, as she recalled in her autobiography, "at sea in a dense fog".

At that time, Helen Keller was able to communicate somewhat with Martha Washington, who was two years older and the daughter of the family cook, and understood the girl's signs;by the age of seven, Helen Keller had more than 60 home signs to communicate with her family, and could distinguish people by the vibration of their footsteps.

Helen Keller initially struggled with lessons since she could not comprehend that every object had a word identifying it.

The next month, Helen Keller made a breakthrough, when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on the palm of her hand, while running cool water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of "water".

Helen Keller quickly demanded that Sullivan sign the names of all the other familiar objects in her world.

In May 1888, Helen Keller started attending the Perkins Institute for the Blind.

In 1896, they returned to Massachusetts, and Helen Keller entered The Cambridge School for Young Ladies before gaining admittance, in 1900, to Radcliffe College of Harvard University, where she lived in Briggs Hall, South House.

In 1904, at the age of 24, Helen Keller graduated from Radcliffe as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, becoming the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Helen Keller maintained a correspondence with the Austrian pedagogue and philosopher Wilhelm Jerusalem, who was one of the first to discover her literary talent.

Helen Keller learned to "hear" people's speech using the Tadoma method, which means using her fingers to feel the lips and throat of the speaker.

Helen Keller became proficient at using braille, and used fingerspelling to communicate.

Helen Keller was a young woman from Scotland who had no experience with deaf or blind people.

Helen Keller progressed to working as a secretary as well, and eventually became a constant companion to Keller.

Helen Keller moved to Forest Hills, Queens, together with Sullivan and Macy, and used the house as a base for her efforts on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind.

Sullivan died in 1936, with Helen Keller holding her hand, after falling into a coma as a result of coronary thrombosis.

Helen Keller was an advocate for people with disabilities, amid numerous other causes.

Helen Keller traveled to twenty-five different countries giving motivational speeches about deaf people's conditions.

Helen Keller was a suffragist, pacifist, Christian socialist, birth control supporter, and opponent of Woodrow Wilson.

In 1920, Helen Keller helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union.

Helen Keller traveled to over 40 countries with Sullivan, making several trips to Japan and becoming a favorite of the Japanese people.

Helen Keller, who believed that the poor were "ground down by industrial oppression", wanted children born into poor families to have the same opportunities to succeed that she had enjoyed.

In 1909, Helen Keller became a member of the Socialist Party of America ; she actively campaigned and wrote in support of the working class from 1909 to 1921.

Helen Keller had speech therapy to have her voice understood better by the public.

Helen Keller later wrote of finding "in Henry George's philosophy a rare beauty and power of inspiration, and a splendid faith in the essential nobility of human nature".

Helen Keller stated that newspaper columnists who had praised her courage and intelligence before she expressed her socialist views now called attention to her disabilities.

Helen Keller responded to that editor, referring to having met him before he knew of her political views:.

In 1912, Helen Keller joined the Industrial Workers of the World, saying that parliamentary socialism was "sinking in the political bog".

Helen Keller wrote for the IWW between 1916 and 1918.

In Why I Became an IWW, Helen Keller explained that her motivation for activism came in part from her concern about blindness and other disabilities:.

Helen Keller supported eugenics, which had become popular with both new understandings and misapprehensions of principles of biological inheritance.

Helen Keller met Deaf Society of Canterbury Life Member Patty Still in Christchurch.

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

At age 22, with help from Sullivan and Sullivan's husband John Macy, Helen Keller published her autobiography, The Story of My Life.

Helen Keller wrote The World I Live In in 1908, giving readers an insight into how she felt about the world.

Helen Keller described the core of her belief in these words:.

Helen Keller has provided religion of some kind everywhere, and it does not matter to what race or creed anyone belongs if he is faithful to his ideals of right living.

Helen Keller had a series of strokes in 1961 and spent the last years of her life at her home.

Helen Keller devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind.

Helen Keller died in her sleep on June 1,1968, at her home, Arcan Ridge, located in Easton, Connecticut, at the age of 87.

Helen Keller's ashes were buried at the Washington National Cathedral next to her constant companions, Anne Sullivan and Polly Thomson.

Helen Keller was the subject of the Academy Award-winning 1954 documentary Helen Keller in Her Story, narrated by her friend and noted theatrical actress Katharine Cornell; in 2023, the film was added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Helen Keller was profiled in The Story of Helen Keller, part of the Famous Americans series produced by Hearst Entertainment.

In 1999, Helen Keller was listed fifth in Gallup's Most Widely Admired People of the 20th century.

That same year, Helen Keller was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century.

In 1973, Helen Keller was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Helen Keller was posthumously inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1971.

Helen Keller was one of twelve inaugural inductees to the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame on June 8,2015.