Re: [AI] Autobiography of Helen Keller is needed

Nagaraj H Thu, 06 Jan 2011 19:04:06 -0800

On 1/4/11, ashik <ashikhir...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Members,
>
> Congratulations on the birth anniversary of Louis Braille today. By the way,
> does anyone have the autobiography of Helen Keller? Please pass it on to me
> if it is there.
>
> With best regards.
> - - -
> Ashik Hirani
> Landline phone: 02849-242233
> Skype: ashikali.hirani
> I would prefer flowers on my table rather than diamonds in my necklace.
> Celebrating Louis Braille's birthday, Jan. 4th.
>
> To unsubscribe send a message to accessindia-requ...@accessindia.org.in with
> the subject unsubscribe.
>
> To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please
> visit the list home page at
>   http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
>
dear sir I am wishing you a happy prosperous new year and 202nd louis
braille birth
I am sending information regarding biography and autography of
helenkeller in the message body only.
Helen Keller
Contents

list of 13 items
1 Early childhood and illness
2 Formal education
3 Companions
4 Political activities
5 Writings
6 Akita dog
7 Later life
8 Portrayals
9 Posthumous honors
10 See also
11 References
12 Further reading
13 External links

Helen Keller
Helen_KellerA.jpg/220px-Helen_KellerA
Keller in 1904
Born
June 27, 1880
Tuscumbia, Alabama,
USA
Died
June 1, 1968 (aged 87)
Arcan Ridge,
Easton, Connecticut,
USA
Signature
Helen_keller_signature.png/220px-Helen_keller_signature
table end

Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) was an American author,
political activist,
and
lecturer.
She was the first
deaf blind
person to earn a
Bachelor of Arts
degree.
[1]
[2]
The story of how Keller's teacher,
Anne Sullivan,
broke through the isolation imposed by a near complete lack of
language, allowing the girl to blossom as she learned to communicate,
has become known worldwide
through the dramatic depictions of the play and film
The Miracle Worker.

A prolific author, Keller was well-traveled, and was outspoken in her
opposition to war.
A member of the
Socialist Party of America
and the
Wobblies,
she campaigned for
women's suffrage,
workers' rights,
and
socialism,
as well as many other
leftist
causes.

list end
we celebrate her birth day on every year on 27th june which is
observed as international helenkeller's day.
Early childhood and illness

Helen_Keller_with_Anne_Sullivan_in_July_1888.jpg/220px-Helen_Keller_with_Anne_Sullivan_in_July_1888
Enlarge
Keller with
Anne Sullivan
vacationing at
Cape Cod
in July 1888

Helen Adams Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama.
Her family lived on a homestead,
Ivy Green,
[3]
that Helen's grandfather had built decades earlier.
[4]
Helen's father, Arthur H. Keller,
[5]
spent many years as an editor for the Tuscumbia North Alabamian and
had served as a captain for the
Confederate Army.
[4]
Helen's paternal grandmother was the second cousin of
Robert E. Lee.
[6]
Helen's mother, Kate Adams,
[7]
was the daughter of Charles Adams.
[8]
Though originally from Massachusetts, Charles Adams also fought for
the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, earning the rank
of brigadier-general.
[6]

Helen's father's lineage can be traced to Casper Keller, a native of
Switzerland.
[6]
[9]
Coincidentally, one of Helen's Swiss ancestors was the first teacher
for the deaf in Zurich.
[6]
Helen reflects upon this coincidence in her first autobiography,
stating "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."
[6]

Helen Keller was not born blind and deaf; it was not until she was 19
months old that she contracted an illness described by doctors as "an
acute congestion
of the stomach and the brain", which might have been
scarlet fever
or
meningitis.
The illness did not last for a particularly long time, but it left her
deaf and blind. At that time, she was able to communicate somewhat
with Martha Washington,
[10]
the six-year-old daughter of the family cook, who understood her
signs; by the age of seven, she had over 60
home signs
to communicate with her family.

In 1886, her mother, inspired by an account in
Charles Dickens'
American Notes
of the successful education of another deaf and blind child,
Laura Bridgman,
dispatched young Helen, accompanied by her father, to seek out Dr. J.
Julian Chisolm, an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist in
Baltimore,
for advice.
[11]
He subsequently put them in touch with
Alexander Graham Bell,
who was working with deaf children at the time. Bell advised the
couple to contact the
Perkins Institute for the Blind,
the school where Bridgman had been educated, which was then located in
South Boston.
Michael Anaganos, the school's director, asked former student
Anne Sullivan,
herself visually impaired and only 20 years old, to become Keller's
instructor. It was the beginning of a 49-year-long relationship,
Sullivan evolving
into
governess
and then eventual
companion.

Anne Sullivan arrived at Keller's house in March 1887, and immediately
began to teach Helen to communicate by spelling words into her hand,
beginning with
"d-o-l-l" for the doll that she had brought Keller as a present.
Keller's big breakthrough in communication came the next month, 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"; she then nearly
exhausted Sullivan demanding the names of all the other familiar
objects in her world.

Due to a protruding left eye, Keller was usually photographed in
profile. Both her eyes were replaced in adulthood with glass replicas
for "medical and
cosmetic reasons".
[12]

Formal education

Helenkellerannesullivan1898.jpg/170px-Helenkellerannesullivan1898
Enlarge
Keller and Sullivan in 1898

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.
Her admirer,
Mark Twain,
had introduced her to
Standard Oil
magnate
Henry Huttleston Rogers,
who, with his wife, paid for her education. In 1904, at the age of 24,
Keller graduated from Radcliffe, becoming the first deaf blind person
to earn a
Bachelor of Arts degree. She maintained a correspondence with the
Austrian philosopher and pedagogue
Wilhelm Jerusalem,
who was one of the first to discover her literary talent.
[13]

Companions

Anne Sullivan stayed as a companion to Helen Keller long after she
taught her. Anne married John Macy in 1905, and her health started
failing around 1914.
Polly Thompson was hired to keep house. She was a young woman from
Scotland who didn't have experience with deaf or blind people. She
progressed to working
as a secretary as well, and eventually became a constant companion to Keller.
[14]

Keller moved to
Forest Hills, Queens
together with Anne and John, and used the house as a base for her
efforts on behalf of American Foundation for the Blind.
[15]

After Anne died in 1936, Keller and Thompson moved to
Connecticut.
They traveled worldwide and raised funding for the blind. Thompson had
a stroke in 1957 from which she never fully recovered, and died in
1960.
[1]

Winnie Corbally, a nurse who was originally brought in to care for
Polly Thompson in 1957, stayed on after Thompson's death and was
Keller's companion for
the rest of her life.
[1]

Political activities

Hellen_Keller_circa_1920.jpg/220px-Hellen_Keller_circa_1920
Enlarge
Helen Keller sitting holding a
magnolia
flower, circa 1920.

"The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of
all ... The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations,
the bankers,
the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of
mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands - the
ownership and control
of their livelihoods - are set at naught, we can have neither men's
rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by
industrial oppression
in order that the small remnant may live in ease."

— Helen Keller, 1911
[16]

Keller went on to become a world-famous speaker and author. She is
remembered as an
advocate for people with disabilities,
amid numerous other causes. She was a
suffragist,
a
pacifist,
an opponent of
Woodrow Wilson,
a
radical
socialist
and a
birth control supporter.
In 1915 she and
George Kessler
founded the
Helen Keller International
(HKI) organization. This organization is devoted to research in
vision, health and nutrition. In 1920 she helped to found the
American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU). Keller and Sullivan traveled to over 39 countries, making
several trips to Japan and becoming a favorite of the
Japanese people.
Keller met every
U.S. President
from
Grover Cleveland
to
Lyndon B. Johnson
and was friends with many famous figures, including
Alexander Graham Bell,
Charlie Chaplin
and Mark Twain.

Keller was a member of the
Socialist Party
and actively campaigned and wrote in support of the
working class
from 1909 to 1921. She supported Socialist Party candidate
Eugene V. Debs
in each of his campaigns for the presidency.

Keller and her friend Mark Twain were both considered radicals at the
beginning of the 20th century, and as a consequence, their political
views have been
forgotten or glossed over in popular perception.
[17]
Newspaper columnists who had praised her courage and intelligence
before she expressed her socialist views now called attention to her
disabilities. The
editor of the
Brooklyn Eagle
wrote that her "mistakes sprung out of the manifest limitations of
her development." Keller responded to that editor, referring to having
met him before
he knew of her political views:

“
At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush
to remember them. But now that I have come out for socialism he
reminds me and the
public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error. I must
have shrunk in intelligence during the years since I met him...Oh,
ridiculous Brooklyn
Eagle! Socially blind and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a
system that is the cause of much of the physical blindness and
deafness which we are
trying to prevent.
[18]
”

Keller joined the
Industrial Workers of the World
(known as the IWW or the Wobblies) in 1912,
[17]
saying that parliamentary socialism was "sinking in the political
bog". She wrote for the IWW between 1916 and 1918. In Why I Became an
IWW,
[19]
Keller explained that her motivation for activism came in part from
her concern about blindness and other disabilities:

“
I was appointed on a commission to investigate the conditions of the
blind. For the first time I, who had thought blindness a misfortune
beyond human control,
found that too much of it was traceable to wrong industrial
conditions, often caused by the selfishness and greed of employers.
And the social evil contributed
its share. I found that poverty drove women to a life of shame that
ended in blindness.
”

The last sentence refers to
prostitution
and
syphilis,
the former a frequent cause of the latter, and the latter a leading
cause of blindness.

Writings

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

One of her earliest pieces of writing, at age 11, was
The Frost King
(1891). There were allegations that this story had been
plagiarized
from The Frost Fairies by Margaret Canby. An investigation into the
matter revealed that Keller may have experienced a case of
cryptomnesia,
which was that she had Canby's story read to her but forgot about it,
while the memory remained in her subconscious.
[1]

At age 22, Keller published her autobiography,
The Story of My Life
(1903), with help from Sullivan and Sullivan's husband, John Macy. It
includes words that Keller wrote and the story of her life up to age
21, and was
written during her time in college.

Keller wrote The World I Live In in 1908 giving readers an insight
into how she felt about the world.
[20]
Out of the Dark, a series of essays on socialism, was published in 1913.

Her spiritual autobiography, My Religion, was published in 1927 and
re-issued as
Light in my Darkness.
It advocates the teachings of
Emanuel Swedenborg,
the controversial
mystic
who gives a spiritual interpretation of the
Last Judgment
and
second coming
of
Jesus Christ,
and the movement named after him,
Swedenborgianism.

Akita dog

When Keller visited
Akita Prefecture
in Japan in July 1937, she inquired about
Hachikō,
the famed
Akita
dog that had died in 1935. She told a Japanese person that she would
like to have an Akita dog; one was given to her within a month, with
the name of
Kamikaze
-go. When he died of
canine distemper,
his older brother, Kenzan-go, was presented to her as an official gift
from the Japanese government in July 1938. Keller is credited with
having introduced
the Akita to the United States through these two dogs.

By 1939 a
breed standard
had been established and
dog shows
had been held, but such activities stopped after
World War II
began. Keller wrote in the Akita Journal:

“
If ever there was an angel in fur, it was Kamikaze. I know I shall
never feel quite the same tenderness for any other pet. The Akita dog
has all the qualities
that appeal to me — he is gentle, companionable and trusty.
[21]
[22]
”

Later life

Keller suffered a series of
strokes
in 1961 and spent the last years of her life at her home.
[1]

On September 14, 1964,
President
Lyndon B. Johnson
awarded her the
Presidential Medal of Freedom,
one of the United States' highest two civilian honors.
[23]
In 1965 she was elected to the
National Women's Hall of Fame
at the
New York World's Fair.
[1]

Keller devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the
American Foundation for the Blind.
She died in her sleep on June 1, 1968, at her home, Arcan Ridge, located in
Easton,
Connecticut.
A service was held in her honor at the
National Cathedral
in
Washington, D.C.,
and her ashes were placed there next to her constant companions, Anne
Sullivan and Polly Thompson.

Portrayals

Keller's life has been interpreted many times. She appeared in a
silent film,
Deliverance
(1919), which told her story in a melodramatic, allegorical style.
[24]

She was also the subject of the documentaries
Helen Keller in Her Story,
narrated by
Katharine Cornell,
and The Story of Helen Keller, part of the Famous Americans series produced by
Hearst Entertainment.

BancroftDuke.jpg/150px-BancroftDuke
Enlarge
Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke (right) in the Broadway play
The Miracle Worker
(1959-1961)

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. The common
title of the cycle echoes
Mark Twain
's description of Sullivan as a "miracle worker." Its first
realization was the 1957
Playhouse 90
teleplay
of that title by
William Gibson.
He adapted it for a
Broadway production in 1959
and an Oscar-winning
feature film in 1962,
starring
Anne Bancroft
and
Patty Duke.
It was remade for television in 1979 and 2000.

In 1984, Helen Keller's life story was made into a
TV movie
called
The Miracle Continues.
[25]
This film that entailed the semi-sequel to The Miracle Worker
recounts her college years and her early adult life. None of the early
movies hint at the

social activism
that would become the hallmark of Keller's later life, although
The Walt Disney Company
version produced in 2000 states in the credits that she became an activist for
social equality.

The
Bollywood
movie
Black
(2005) was largely based on Keller's story, from her childhood to her
graduation. A
documentary
called Shining Soul: Helen Keller's Spiritual Life and Legacy was
produced by the
Swedenborg Foundation
in the same year. The film focuses on the role played by
Emanuel Swedenborg
's spiritual theology in her life and how it inspired Keller's triumph
over her triple disabilities of blindness, deafness and a severe
speech impediment.

On March 6, 2008, the
New England Historic Genealogical Society
announced that a staff member had discovered a rare 1888 photograph
showing Helen and Anne, which, although previously published, had
escaped widespread
attention.
[26]
Depicting Helen holding one of her many dolls, it is believed to be
the earliest surviving photograph of Anne.
[27]

Posthumous honors

Alabama_quarter%2C_reverse_side%2C_2003.jpg/220px-Alabama_quarter%2C_reverse_side%2C_2003
Enlarge
Helen Keller as depicted on the Alabama state quarter

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

In 2003,
Alabama
honored its native daughter on its
state quarter.
[28]

The Helen Keller Hospital in
Sheffield, Alabama
is dedicated to her.
[29]

There are streets named after Helen Keller in
Getafe,
Spain and
Lod,
Israel.
[30]

A pre-school for the deaf and hard of hearing in Mysore, India, was
originally named after Helen Keller by its founder
K. K. Srinivasan.

On October 7, 2009, a bronze statue of Helen Keller was added to the
National Statuary Hall Collection,
as a replacement for the State of Alabama's former 1908 statue of
Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry.
It is displayed in the
United States Capitol Visitor Center
and depicts Keller as a seven year old child standing at a
water pump.
The statue represents the seminal moment in Keller's life when she
understood her first word: W-A-T-E-R, as signed into her hand by
teacher Anne Sullivan.
The pedestal base bears a quotation in raised letters and Braille
characters: "The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be
seen or even touched,
they must be felt with the heart."
[31]
The statue is the first one of a handicapped person and of a child to
be permanently displayed at the
U.S. Capitol.
[32]
[33]
[34]

Re: [AI] Autobiography of Helen Keller is needed

Reply via email to