biography
| name: |
Keller, Helen (Adams)
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| sex:
| female
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| lived:
| (1880–1968)
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| biography:
| Writer and lecturer, born in Tuscumbia, Alabama, USA. She became blind and deaf at 19 months, and in a breakthrough made famous by subsequent popular dramatizations, was taught to speak, read, and write when she was seven years old by Anne Mansfield Sullivan (later Mrs Macy), known as ‘Teacher’ to Keller and ‘the Miracle Worker’ among the general public. Sullivan remained Keller's interpreter and companion until her death in 1936. Keller received communications by lipreading, braille, and finger-spelling using a manual alphabet, and she expressed herself through finger-spelling, typewriting, and speech. She achieved international celebrity as a child, graduated from Radcliffe College (1904), and as an adult she lectured and published widely on both her own experiences and political, social, and educational issues. She promoted Socialism and women's suffrage, raised funds for the American Foundation for the Blind, and remains a model of achievement among the severely disabled. Her autobiography, The Story of My Life (1902), was dramatized by William Gibson in The Miracle Worker (1959, Pulitzer, filmed 1962). |
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