Essay, Biography or Paragraph on “Helen Keller” great author complete biography for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Helen Keller

(1880 – 1968)

The story of Helen Keller is the story or a normal child who, at the age of 18 months, was suddenly shut off from the world but, against overwhelming odds, waged a slow, hard but successful battle to re-enter that same world. The child grew into a highly intelligent and sensitive woman who wrote, spoke and laboured incessantly for the betterment of others. Helen was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama on June 27, 1880. However, her real life began one day in March of 1887, when she was almost seven years old. It was the day when Annie Sullivan, a 20-year-old graduate of the Perkins School for the Blind, came to be her teacher.

They were inseparable until Annie’s death in 1936. Even as a little girl Helen expressed a desire to go to college. In 1900, she entered Radcliffe College and graduated from there cum laude in 1904. She thus became the first deaf-blind person to graduate from college. Throughout these years, Annie Sullivan laboriously spelled books and lectures into her pupil’s hand. Keller’s life was not free from financial problems. In 1919 she began a four-year stretch appearing with Sullivan in vaudeville shows. She made lecture tours to promote interest in the handicapped, wrote several books, and appeared on the Orpheum Circuit for two years to support herself. She visited American veteran’s hospitals after WW II and made many tours in Europe, Asia, and Africa.

While still at Radcliffe, Helen Keller began the writing career, which was to continue for 50 years. In addition to The Story of My Life, she wrote 11 other books and numerous articles on blindness, deafness, social issues and women’s rights. Despite the broad range of her interests, Helen Keller never lost sight of the needs of others who were blind and deaf-blind. She was a personal friend of Dr. Peter J. Salmon, Executive Director of Helen Keller Ser-vices for the Blind (then known as the Industrial Home for the Blind) and lent her support to the establishment of what has be-come known as the Helen Keller National Center for the Deaf-Blind Youths and Adults. She was a visitor to a number of facilities and programs operated by IHB.

In 1936, Helen Keller moved to West port, Connecticut, where she lived until her death on June 1, 1968, at the age of 87. In his eulogy at her funeral, Senator Lister Hill said of her, “She will live on, one of the few, immortal names not born to die. Her spirit will endure as long as man can read and stories can be told of the woman who showed the world there are no boundaries to courage and faith.”