Keller, Helen, 1880-1968

At the age of nineteen months, due to an attack of scarlet fever, Helen Keller lost her senses of sight and hearing. Keller's parents requested that a teacher from the Perkins Institution in Boston, Massachusetts, be sent to instruct the child soon thereafter. Anne M. Sullivan was sent to Helen's home in Tuscumbia, Alabama, to train her according to the methods of Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe. From 1888 onwards, at the Perkins Institution, and under Sarah Fuller at the Horace Mann School in New York, she learned to read, write, and talk, and became proficient to some degree in the ordinary education curriculum, several languages, and mathematics.

In 1900, Keller entered Radcliffe College. With the aid of Anne Sullivan and other tutors, she took a full program of 17 1/2 courses including Mathematics, Latin, French, German, English and History, and graduated cum laude in 1904. After her college education, Keller began working extensively in causes for people who are blind in the United States and internationally. She made many tours and held fund-raising benefits for the American Foundation for the Blind. During and after World War II she focused her efforts on aiding veterans, orphans, and refugees. Various honors, awards, and honorary degrees and citations were conferred upon Keller by foreign governments and civic, educational, and welfare organizations throughout the United States. Keller's writings include: Optimism (1903), "The Song of the Stone Wall" (1910), Helen Keller's Journal (1938), Teacher (1955), and others.