Helen Keller

Helen Adams Keller (Tuscumbia, Alabama, June 27, 1880-Easton, Connecticut, June 1, 1968) was an American deafblind writer, speaker, and political activist. At the age of nineteen months, she suffered a serious illness that caused her complete loss of vision and hearing. Her inability to communicate from an early age was very traumatic for Helen and her family, and she was virtually uncontrollable for a time. When she was seven years old, her parents decided to look for an instructor and that is how the Perkins Institute for the Blind sent them a young specialist, Anne Sullivan, who took charge of her training and she achieved a breakthrough in special education. She continued to live next to her until her death in 1936.

After graduating from high school in Cambridge, Keller entered Radcliffe College, where he received a BA, becoming the first deafblind person to earn a college degree. During his youth, he began to support socialism and in 1905 he formally joined the Socialist Party. Throughout his life he wrote multiple articles and more than a dozen books about his experiences and ways of understanding life, among them The story of my life (1903) and Light in my darkness (1927).

Keller became a prominent activist and philanthropist; raised money for the American Foundation for the Blind, was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World—where he wrote from 1916 to 1918—and promoted women's suffrage, workers' rights, socialism, and other left-wing causes, as well as to be an active figure in the American Civil Liberties Union after co-founding it in 1920. In 1924 he withdrew from political activity to focus on the fight for the rights of people with disabilities and traveled around the world giving lectures until 1957. For her achievements, US President Lyndon Johnson awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. Since 1980, by decree of Jimmy Carter, the day of her birth is commemorated as Helen Keller Day. of varied artistic representations, both in film, theater and television, particularly highlighting The Miracle Worker.

Ancestry

"Ivy Green", the house built by Keller's grandfather in 1820

Helen Adams Keller was born in Tuscumbia, the administrative center of Colbert County, where her parents owned a farm, "Ivy Green", built by Helen's grandfather in 1820. Although her father's proposed name had After Mildred Campbell, named after her great-grandmother, her mother decided that she should take her maternal grandmother's middle name, Helen Everett. However, her father, out of emotion, forgot part of the name on the way to church and was eventually enrolled as Helen Adams.

His father, Arthur H. Keller (1836-1896), owned the Tuscumbia North Alabamian newspaper since 1870 and had served as a captain in the Confederate army. He had been married twice; his first wife, Sarah Rosser, with whom he had two children, died in 1877. The year after he was widowed, he married a second wife to the daughter of a military man, Kate Adams (1856-1921), twenty years his junior, with the one who had three children: Helen, Mildred (1886-1969) and Philips (1891-1971). The marriage lasted until Arthur's death in 1896 and Kate survived him until 1921.

Her paternal grandmother was the niece of Robert E. Lee, daughter of LaFayette's aide-de-camp Alexander Moore, and granddaughter of Alexander Spotswood, Governor of Virginia from 1710 to 1722. Her maternal grandfather, Charles W. Adams (1817- 1878), a native of Massachusetts and a descendant of the second US President John Adams, also fought for the Confederate Army during the US Civil War, earning the rank of colonel and serving as brigadier-general.

His financially prosperous family suffered financially from the defeat of the Confederacy and lived more modestly thereafter. His paternal lineage traces back to Casper Keller, originally from Switzerland, that he decided to settle in the New World and acquired tracts of land in Alabama; coincidentally, one of Helen's Swiss ancestors was the first teacher for the deaf in Zurich. Keller reflected on this coincidence in his autobiography: "There is no king who has not had a slave in his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king." among their own".

Biography

Early Years

Helen Keller at the age of 7

Helen Keller was born with normal ability to see and hear, and around her first year of life, she began to walk. She had excellent vision, to the point that she was able to easily distinguish a dropped pin on the ground. According to his mother, he was able to say a few words at the age of six months; she managed to stammer “hello” and on one occasion she barged into a meeting requesting “tea, tea, tea.” Some words, including “water,” were retained in her memory even after her illness.

At the age of 19 months, she suffered from a serious condition that doctors at the time called cerebro-stomach congestion, although modern specialists suggest it may have been scarlet fever, measles, or meningitis. A pediatrician thought her life was in danger and was pleasantly surprised to see that the fever spikes subsequently subsided, and he was therefore able to recover. However, the disease left significant sequelae in its wake: complete loss of hearing and vision. After that, he became a into a vain and demanding girl who gets angry easily. Her anger caused by feeling different from other people turned into fits of rage when she realized that others used their mouths to communicate, and not gestures.

Helen spent her early years on her family's farm, where she enjoyed walking around the gardens and being in contact with the animals there. During the period leading up to Anne Sullivan's arrival, she was unable to communicate with her family although she expressed her wishes through gestures. By the age of seven, Helen was using approximately 60 home signs. Despite her lack of hearing and vision, he had as a regular companion the cook's daughter, Martha Washington, a black girl six years older with whom he used to entertain himself daily.

At the age of five, the Keller family moved house. Though they doubted Helen was amenable to learning, her mother Kate, inspired by the travelogue Notes from America of Charles Dickens, where Laura Bridgman manages to educate herself thanks to Samuel Howie despite her disability, in 1886 she sent her daughter to Baltimore accompanied by her father to seek the advice of otolaryngologist J. Julian Chisolm. He recommended Alexander Graham Bell, who was working with deaf children in Washington. Bell, for his part, referred them to the Perkins Institute for the Blind, a school in South Boston where Bridgman had been educated. Michael Anagnos, director of the institution, was asked by Anne Sullivan, a 20-year-old former student with visual impairments., who became Keller's instructor.

The Arrival of Anne Sullivan

Helen Keller along with Anne Sullivan in 1888.

Anne Sullivan, a visually impaired teacher and graduate of the Perkins Institute for the Blind, arrived at Helen's home in March 1887. In her autobiography, Keller would say, "I marvel at the immeasurable contrasts between the two lives brought together by that encounter." Immediately, he requested a separate room to facilitate understanding of Helen's knowledge and began teaching her to communicate by spelling words on her hand. At first she resisted as she did not understand that there was a single word assigned to each object. In fact, when he tried to teach her the word "cup", Helen became so frustrated that she broke her mug. Keller's breakthrough in communication came the following month, when he realized that the movements his teacher was making in the cup palm of his hand while running cool water over his other hand symbolized the idea of "water". For a month, he was not able to tell the difference between verbs and nouns, but he did understand that there was a relationship between words and nouns. objects quickly. As the days passed, he learned to form sentences and to spell by the same procedure some words and verbs such as "pin", "hat", "get up", "sit" and "walk".

According to Keller, on many occasions learning new words would revive a forgotten image in his mind as a result of some sensation. It was around this time that he began to perceive abstract ideas when he understood that the word could also designate a feeling. From the beginning, her educator kept the rule of addressing her like any other child, with the difference that instead of pronouncing words, she spelled them in her hand. If Helen was unable to find the right words for the expression of her thoughts, her instructor answered them herself.

Unlike deaf children, ordinary children learn words by imitation, and conversations in the environment stimulate their intelligence, suggest objects, and lead them to spontaneously express their own thoughts. Word repetition was a fundamental mechanism for Sullivan, who in turn taught Helen with great difficulty to take part in conversations by hand-spelling words. Years later, Keller would choose her for her "particular understanding, intelligence, and gentle tact" from her.

The next challenge for Helen was learning to read. After she became fluent in spelling, Sullivan provided her with small raised-letter cards with which she arranged words and formed short sentences. Helen recalled an exercise of hers in her autobiography: «For example, after having found the little cards with the words“ the doll is on the bed ”, I placed each word on her object; then I would put the doll to bed with these words by its side... This constituted a sentence, and I associated in my mind the ideas of the things expressed by the words with the complex act which together they revealed." Helen subsequently received classes in arithmetic, zoology and botany with the help of her teacher, who taught her to count by means of operations strung together by groups.

Three months after the start of his training, he was able to read and write using braille and shortly after, to use the pencil. She was so fascinated with reading that at night she used to take books written in braille to read under the covers of her bed.As a result of the work done, Helen's character changed dramatically and she became more civilized and gentle. He also learned to read people's lips by touch and by sensing their movement and vibrations.Anagnos was so surprised by Helen's progress that he wrote some notes about it. That was how her name began to appear on the first pages of her publications.

Secondary education

Keller in the early 1890s

Keller along with Alexander Graham Bell, 1902

Sullivan accompanied Keller for forty-nine years until his death. In May 1888, they both moved to the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston. There, Helen became friends with all the blind children: "it would be impossible for me to express how happy I was, seeing that they all understand the manual alphabet," she confessed in her autobiography. In addition, she took advantage of her stay to visit Bunker Hill, where she received her first history lesson.

When he was ten years old, he met the deaf-blind Norwegian Ragnhild Kåta, who had managed to learn to speak. Helen was eager to achieve that goal even though her family tried to talk her out of fearing she would experience deep frustration if she couldn't. Despite this, Sullivan took Keller to educator Sarah Fuller, the director of the Horace Mann School for the Deaf, which was dedicated to helping people with speech disabilities. Fuller provided eleven lessons, using a method called Tadoma developed from Graham Bell, in which he pressed his fingers to the trainee's throat and made a sound, while the trainee felt the position and shape Fuller's tongue took when speaking and then imitated it. Helen later practiced this method independently with Sullivan at his side and eventually, he was able to articulate his throat to pronounce words, although his voice at the end of his life continued to be difficult for people to understand.

In 1891, an incident occurred that led to the deterioration of the relationship between Keller and the directors of the Perkins Center. On November 4 of that year she sent Anagnos a short story she had written herself called The Frost King as a birthday present. Anagnos was fascinated and decided to publish it in the institution's magazine. However, he later discovered that the story was exactly the same as one by children's writer Margaret Canby, so he felt cheated. Apparently, Helen had read the tale years before and at the time of writing The Frost King , she relied entirely on it unconsciously. The accusation of plagiarism was very hurtful to Helen and her teacher Anne of hers, so in 1892 they left the Perkins Institute. The explanation given was that Helen's mind went through a process of cryptomnesia, a phenomenon whereby a memory disturbance occurs consisting of evoking a memory and not recognizing it as such, so that the idea seems new and personal. This type of phenomenon usually occurs in cases of involuntary plagiarism, where the subject believes that they have created something for the first time through an unprecedented combination of stimuli, but in reality it was an idea recovered just as it was stored in memory. According to Sullivan, Canby's account came into the possession of Helen in 1888 during a visit to her friend Sophia Hopkins, who had a copy of it. Mark Twain, who deeply admired Keller, called the story "utterly idiotic and grotesque." » in 1903. Fortunately, Helen was pardoned by Perkins decades later and continued to support the institution by donating braille books to the library and was even present when the Keller-Sullivan building became the headquarters of the Deafblind Program from the school in 1956.

Later, she stopped attending classes in schools and dedicated herself to studying with her educator and private teachers. The success of her training was due not only to her will but also to the improved financial well-being of her family, which could afford to hire teachers and establish her in private schools. In 1894, Helen and Anne helped Juan D Wright and Dr. Thomas Humason in establishing a school for the deaf in New York. That year she attended the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf, where she attended until 1896 before enrolling in the Cambridge School for Ladies in Massachusetts. She was always accompanied by Sullivan, who helped her with homework and reading books, even after her admission to pursue a degree at Radcliffe College.

University studies and belief formation

Helen Keller at the time of graduation in 1904.

Keller took preliminary examinations for entrance to Radcliffe College from June 29 to July 3, 1897. His childhood dream was to go to university. Although he passed the exams, on the recommendation of Her professors did not join the institution until 1900. Her studies were financed by Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleston Rogers and his wife Abbie, whom she had met through Mark Twain. She faced new challenges: her training manuals had to be printed in braille and the classes were overcrowded, although the teachers paid special attention to her, especially with the subjects with which she had the most difficulty, algebra and geometry.

Radcliffe had a great influence on the formation of his leftist political ideology. He became interested in workers' rights when he read that the highest percentage of blind people were in the lower strata of the population due to precarious working conditions in factories. Later, she was associated with women's socialist movements and support for the causes of Emmeline Pankhurst. Her Southern origin played a controversial role in her political views despite the fact that she always spoke out against slavery; Keller's father was a "typical" Southerner and affirmed until the end of his life that blacks were not people. His mother had a more liberal political outlook.

While studying, Keller began writing his first plays. Her autobiography, The Story of My Life, was first published in the Ladies & # 39; Home Journal and was published in book format in 1903. Most critics praised her work and it was subsequently translated into 50 languages and several times reprinted in English.

Keller graduated with honors from the university in 1904, becoming the first deafblind person to earn a bachelor's degree. In the same year, Sullivan married John Macy, a staunch socialist with whom Keller read the play. H. G. Wells's philosophical literature, which further strengthened her views on that ideology. She then turned to the bibliography of Marx and Engels, an experience about which she commented: "It is as if I had been asleep and woke up in a new world ». In 1905, Keller formally joined the Socialist Party, which caused his image to decline drastically in the United States and he became the subject of criticism and ridicule. Journalists in this regard pointed out that Keller could not objectively analyze politics as a consequence of his disability.

Helen Keller, c. 1912.

After college, Keller, Sullivan, and Macy moved into a new home in Forest Hills, where he wrote several books: The World I Live In, Song of the Stonewall and Out of the Darkness. At the same time, he maintained a regular correspondence with the Austrian philosopher and educator Wilhelm Jerusalem, who was one of the first to discover his literary talent. In 1912, gave the first report of his life to Ernest Gruening. Keller decided to join the Industrial Workers of the World, an organization for which he wrote between 1916 and 1918, because his party was "too slow... it sinks into the political swamp", as he stated in an interview with New York Tribune.

It is almost, if not impossible, for the party to maintain its revolutionary character as long as it holds a position under the government... The government does not support the interests that the Socialist Party is supposed to represent. The task, right, is to unite and organize all workers on an economic basis and it is the workers themselves who must ensure freedom for themselves, who must grow strong. Nothing can be acquired by political action. That's why I became an IWW.

Interview with Barbara Bindley, New York Tribune1916.

The relationship between John Macy and Anne Sullivan deteriorated more and more in later years and in 1914 they were formally separated. However, they did not go through with divorce proceedings and by the time of Macy's death in 1932, she was still listed as married. Although Keller never married, on one occasion when Sullivan was ill and her new assistant Polly Thomson was on vacation, her secretary Peter Fagan began assisting her in her daily routine in their absence. Fagan was so attracted to Keller that he made an advance on her and proposed to her, which made Keller both uncomfortable and happy. In her autobiography, she recounted: "His love of hers was a radiant sun that shone on my helplessness and isolation." Her family disapproved of the union since they considered that a person with a disability could not marry.In the society of the time, it was not seen with good eyes that a person with a disability got married and even less that they harbored those feelings.

During World War I, Keller opposed the entry of the United States into the war and co-founded with George Kessler the organization Helen Keller International, dedicated to conducting research on vision, health and nutrition. In 1917, He spoke out in favor of the Russian Revolution and Lenin's policies and in 1918, participated in the creation of the American Civil Liberties Union, whose purpose is to defend and preserve individual rights and freedoms guaranteed to each person by the Constitution. and the laws of the United States. Showing his support for the election campaign of socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs, he sent correspondence to him in prison where he was on sedition charges for his opposition to World War I. Before reading Progress and Poverty, Keller was already an established socialist who believed that Georgism was essential to finding the right political and economic path. She later claimed to have found "in the philosophy of Henry George a rare beauty and power of inspiration, and a splendid faith in the essential nobility of human nature."

Postwar Years and Sullivan's Death

Helen Keller, c. 1920.

Keller became a world-renowned speaker and author, and was considered an ardent advocate for people with disabilities. She maintained a pacifist stance throughout her life, addressing controversial issues in her writing such as prostitution and syphilis (one of the causes of blindness). After joining the Socialist Party, he dedicated himself to carrying out arduous campaigns and writings about the working class, especially from 1909 to 1921. On the other hand, he personally met every US president from Grover Cleveland to John F. Kennedy.

Journalists who had praised his courage and intelligence before he identified himself as a socialist now emphasized his inadequacies; an editor of the Brooklyn Eagle wrote that "its errors arose from manifest limitations in its development," to which Keller responded in a letter: "At that time your compliments to me were so generous that I blush." by remembering them. But now that she has supported socialism, she reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially responsible for erring. I must have dwarfed my intelligence ever since I met him... Oh, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle! Socially deaf and blind, he defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the blindness and physical deafness that we try to prevent." Keller also joined organizations known for their fight against racism in the United States. States, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Helen Keller reading lips (January 1926)

Keller's wartime activities attracted many filmmakers. The idea of making a documentary about her life first came from the hand of the American writer Francis Trevelyan Miller. The shooting took place at the "Brunton" studio under the direction of George Foster Platt and the collaboration of Lawrence Fowler and Arthur Todd. According to Keller, the director had to develop a special system to communicate with her and required with the help of Polly Thomson in translating his words to Keller using the manual alphabet. The silent film was titled Deliverance and was released in 1919.

During the 1920s, Keller began to travel around the country lecturing in the company of Sullivan. After 1924, he withdrew almost completely from politics to devote himself to work with the visually impaired, a task which he it was given to him when he joined the American Foundation for the Blind. She there, she not only served as a teacher but also as an activist for the rights of blind people, who were often incorrectly educated and placed in nursing homes. Her efforts were a major factor in changing these conditions.In 1932, she was appointed Vice President of the Royal Institute for the Blind in the United Kingdom.

Anne Sullivan, his companion of 49 years, died in 1936 after a period in a coma, with Keller holding her hand at her side. Following her death, she and Thomson moved to Westport, Connecticut. a severe loss to Keller, who in 1929 had written: "I offer a trembling supplication to the Lord, for if she goes, I shall go blind and deaf indeed."

In 1937, Keller traveled to Japan, where he learned the story of the dog Hachiko. He admitted that he would like to have a copy of his breed and after a month, he was presented with an Akita Inu called "Kamikaze-go". When he died of canine distemper shortly thereafter, the Japanese government gave his brother, "Kenzan-go," as an official state gift in July 1938. Keller is credited with introducing and popularizing the Akita to the United States. United thanks to these two specimens. In his own words, "I never felt the same tenderness for any other domestic animal. He (the Akita) is friendly, sociable and trustworthy."

Later Life

Helen Keller next to actress Patty Duke in 1961.

After being named ambassador for International Relations by the American Foundation for the Overseas Blind, she began touring the world. Between 1946 and 1957, Keller visited 35 countries in South America, Europe, and Africa, with stays funded by the Department and the American Foundation for the Blind. In 1948, three years after the atomic bombings, she paid a visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki as part of her opposition-to-war program and was delighted with the warm welcome which he received from two million people in these cities. After World War II ended, he visited soldiers who had lost their sight or hearing during combat in order to offer them support and encouragement. With the collaboration of Nella Henney, Sullivan's biographer, both dedicated themselves to editing his memoirs after his death. In 1954, he participated in the filming of the documentary Helen Keller in Her Story, directed by Nancy Hamilton and narrated by Katharine Cornell, which won the Oscar for Best Long Documentary.

Together with Polly Thomson, she traveled the world and raised funds for the blind. In 1957, Thomson suffered a stroke from which she did not recover, and died in 1960. After her death, she was succeeded by Winnie Corbally, who was with her for the rest of her life. In 1961, Keller suffered a series of strokes. brain disorders that forced her to use a wheelchair and reduce her social activities and public appearances. Due to this, in 1964 she could not attend the ceremony where she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the most prestigious civil recognitions of the United States, by President Lyndon Johnson. In 1965, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame during the New York World's Fair.

Age 87, Keller died in his sleep at 3:35 UTC-5 on June 1, 1968, at his Arcan Ridge residence in Easton, Connecticut, days after suffering a heart attack. After the funeral, she was cremated and her ashes were placed in the Washington National Cathedral along with those of Sullivan and Thomson. Shortly before she died, Keller had exclaimed, "In these dark, silent years, God has been using my life for a purpose I don't know, but one day I'll understand and then I'll be satisfied."

Legacy

Your role in special education

Fourth dollar currency corresponding to the state of Alabama. His reverse shows the figure of Hellen Keller with his name in Braille reduced.

Keller's training meant an important advance in special education, despite the fact that there were other similar cases not known, such as that of Laura Bridgman. However, Keller's teaching was the first to be reliably recorded in multiple written works and gave rise to many new special educational methods.

The editors of the textbook General Psychology noted the importance of Keller's case: "She is the only one of her class pushed by an exceptionally talented teacher, a keen observer who described the gradual development of his highly gifted student, almost a child genius, who had been placed a cruel test by nature, totally shutting down the two key areas of the sensory system. At the same time, General Psychology reported that Sullivan did not initially receive support from the scientific community as it seemed unlikely that her student would adjust to teaching so quickly.

Helen Keller became an example of self-improvement and courage as well as a symbol of the fight for the rights of people with disabilities. A reporter for The Journal of Southern History reported that "...Keller is perceived as a national icon symbolizing the triumph of people with disabilities." Motivational speaker and Christian preacher Nick Vujicic, who born without arms or legs, he confessed in his autobiography that Helen Keller played a very influential role in his life.

Literary work

His first literary work, the autobiography The Story of My Life, was published in 1903 and was widely appreciated by critics and the public, being translated into fifty languages. Currently, his autobiography is part of the required literature program at many schools in the United States. In addition to 14 books, he has published more than 475 articles and essays.

After the success of The Story of My Life, Keller felt she could become a writer. However, after the publication of other works, he faced a problem: the public was only interested in reading his story about overcoming his disability, so his stories about his socialist ideology and workers' rights do not generate interest among readers. His books The World I Live In (1908), Song of the Stone Wall (1910) and his collection of essays Out of Darkness (1913) met with little success and received virtually no critical acclaim.

When Keller was young, Sullivan introduced her to bishop and author Philips Brooks, who introduced her to Christianity, after which she stated, "I always knew he was there, but I just didn't know his name.", My Religion, which evokes the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, was published in 1927 and later republished in 1994 under the title Light in my darkness.

One journalist exclaimed that "in expressing his ideas, he supplies phrases...and uses words that sound like high-sounding poetic metaphors." Other critics were surprised to find in his accounts the expressions "I saw" and "heard"—which usually used to simplify the text. When he used "I heard," for example, he was referring to the vibrations that he sensed in the environment.Psychologist Thomas Kusbort, commenting on this matter, judged the creativity of Keller's epithets, calling them "verbiage."

Acknowledgments and Honors

In 1971, her name was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame. as "Helen Keller Day".

In 1999, Keller was ranked fifth in a Gallup poll of the world's most admired men and women of the 20th century. In 2003, Alabama honored his memory by issuing a quarter dollar coin bearing his likeness as part of a series of 50 commemorative coins to "promote the dissemination of knowledge of individual states, their history, and geography among the young people of the United States". A hospital in Sheffield and various streets in Zurich, Getafe, Lod, Lisbon and Caen bear his name as a tribute.

Keller Statue at the U.S. Capitol

In 2009, a bronze statue of Helen at the age of seven next to a hand pump was added to the National Statuary Hall Collection in the United States Capitol. The monument depicts her childhood in that he understood his first word, "water", and has a quote of his authorship inscribed in relief: "The most beautiful and best things in the world cannot be seen or touched, but they are felt in the heart". His childhood, in which a festival is held each year in his memory and plays The Miracle Worker, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In the words of a reporter for The Journal of Southern History, "Alabama regards [Keller] as its own."

Walter Kendrick wrote in The New York Times newspaper that “the myth of Helen Keller comes in two flavors, sweet and bitter. The sweet, canonical myth portrays her as an earthly angel, saved from the barbarity of darkness and silence by Anne Sullivan, who...taught deaf-blind Helen that the cold wetness that trickled down her hands had a name.: water. This Helen was completely admirable, even heroic. Once she had overcome her deafness and blindness, she dedicated her life to worthy causes". Kendrick also referred to Dorothy Hermann's biographical book, Helen Keller: A Life, commenting that "the image that..... had created of her, that of a brave and handicapped genius, she had little to do with the real Helen." Mark Twain, who deeply admired Keller, compared her to Joan of Arc and considered her one of the most important people of his time with Napoleon Bonaparte.

In popular culture

Keller's life has been brought to the entertainment industry on multiple occasions. She appeared as herself in the silent film Deliverance (1919), which told her story in a melodramatic allegorical style. She was also the subject of the documentary Helen Keller In Her Story, narrated by Katharine Cornell, and The Story of Helen Keller, produced by Hearst Corporation.

The Miracle Worker was a three-act play presented on Broadway in 1959, directed by William Gibson and inspired by his autobiography, The Story of My Life. The various scenes depicted the relationship between Keller and Sullivan, and how it turned an uncontrollable and almost wild girl into an activist and intellectual celebrity. Director Arthur Penn adapted Gibson's work and made it into a film in 1962 under the same title, with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke as protagonists, earning two Academy Awards —best actress and best supporting actress— and three nominations. —Best Wardrobe, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. In 1979 and 2000, two television adaptations were made in the United States.

In 1982, Gibson produced a sequel to his stage play, titled Monday After the Miracle, in which he recreated the lives of Sullivan and Keller after graduation from Radcliffe College. It was adapted for film by Daniel Petrie in 1998, starring Moira Kelly and Roma Downey respectively.

In 1984, a television drama based on Keller's life was released, The Miracle Continues, based on the 1979 television adaptation that chronicled his early college years and early adult life. The Indian film Black (2005), by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, was based on much of Keller's story from his childhood to his graduation. For the shooting of the film, the lead actress Rani Mukerji she had to wear contact lenses to create the impression of blindness and learn sign language and braille for seven months with the help of deafblind students.