Helen Keller was born on June 27,1880, in Tuscumabia, Alabama, to Captain Arthur Henry Keller, a Confederate army veteran and a newspaper editor, and Kate Adams Keller. By all accounts, she was a normal infant. But at nineteen months Keller suffered an illness—perhaps scarlet fever of meningitis—that left her deaf an blind. Although Keller learned basic house hold tasks and could communicate some of her desires through a series of signs, she did not learn language the way other children do. Indeed, her family—and most pepole at the time—wondered if a deaf and blind child could be educated at all.
When Keller was six, her mother managed to get in touch with micheal Anagnos, director of the Perkins Institution for the Blind, who agreed to send one of his graduates Anne Sullivan, to teach Keller. Sullivan's success is the stuff of legend. By the end of her initial round of work with Sulllivan, Keller was well on her way to becoming the national celebrity and activist she would be for rest of her life. After studying at the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf and the Cambridge School for Young Ladies, Keller entered Radcliffe Collage in 1900. In 1902 she began the series of articles for the Ladies' Home Journal that was publiced as The Story of My Life in 1903. When she graduated from Radcliffe with high honors in 1904, some said tha Anne Sullivan, who had been at her side the entire time, translating lectures and assisting with her lessons, deserved a degree, too.
With royalties from The Story of My Life, Keller and Sullivan purchased a home together. In 1905 Sullivan married John Macy, who moved in with them. Macy, a Harvard English instructor and literary critic who had served as editor and literary agent for Keller's book, was an ardent socialist and helped influence Keller's political thinking.
In 1908 Keller published The World I Live In, an account of how she experienced the world through touch, taste and scent. In magazine articles she advocated for increased opportunities for the blind and for improving methods of reducing childhood blindness. Keller joined the Socialist Party of Massachusetts in 1900, and supported many Progressive-era causes, including birth control, labor unions, and the right of women to vote. She also opposed America's involvement in World War I and contributed money to the National Association for Advancement of Colored People(NAACP), actions for which she was widely criticized. Her 1913 collection of essays on social and political issues, Out of the Dark, was poorly received. The fact that her audience would listen to stories of her life but not to her opinions and political theoried was not lost on a frustrated Keller.
In 1920, to make money, Keller and Sullivan toured the vaudeville circuit, performing scenes from their lives and answering audence questions. In 1924, her popularity somewhat recovered, Keller began working as a lecturer and fund-raiser for the American Foundation for the Blind(AFB). In 1927 she published My Religion, in which she escribed her experience with Swedenborgianism, a mystical form of Chritianity. In 1929 she followed up The Story of My Life with Midsteam: My Later Life. She continued advocating for the blind through the 1930s. Though she grew leess politivally outspoken, her progressive politics and support of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War eventually alarmed her employers and earned her an FBI file noting her "Communist" sympathies.
In 1936, Anne Sullivan died. Keller was devastated. The two had been constant companions for nearly fifty years. Still, the dauntless Keller continued writing and lecturing. In 1937 she visited Japan, raising millions for the blind and deaf there, and in 1938 published Hlen Keller's Journal, 1936-1937 to wide acclaim. During World War II, Keller visited wounded soldiers. After the war she toured more than thirty countried, continuing her advocacy for the blind. In 1995 she publicshed Teacher, her biography of Anne Sullivan, and in 1957 The Open Door, a collection of essays.
In 1957, The Miracle Worker, a somewhat sentimental version of Keller's early life, was broadcast live on television. Rewritten for the stage, it became a hit Broadway play in 1959 and an Academy Award-winning movie in 1962, ensuring Helen Keller's lasting fame but effacing her complex and at times controversial adult life.
In 1961 Keller suffered the first of a series of strokes and retierd from public life. In 1964 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, by President Lyndon Johoson. She died on June 1, 1968, at her home in Aran Ridge, Connecticut.