Helen Keller

     Helen Keller photograph, taken in 1913, from The George Grantham Bain Collection maintained at the U.S. Library of Congress.

Self-pity is our worst enemy
and if we yield to it,
we can never do anything good
in the world.

Helen Adams Keller

On the 27th of June, 1880, a baby girl named Helen was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama.  Her father, Captain Arthur Henley Keller, was a former Confederate Army officer.  Her mother, Kate Adams Keller, helped her husband run the family’s cotton plantation.    

By the time the little girl died, nearly eighty-eight years later, she personally knew many of the world’s most famous people.  Mark Twain (the writer) and Alexander Graham Bell (the inventor) were among her close friends.

Although she become famous herself, Helen Adams Keller never saw her friends or heard them speak.  Before she was two years old, she was living inside a world of darkness, surrounded by a world of silence. 

Then she met a teacher who used her own hands and fingers to unlock Helen’s world of isolation.  This is the story of that transformation.

VISUAL VOCABULARY BUILDER

For This Story

Author: Carole D. Bos, J.D.

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Original Release Date:  February, 2009
Updated Quarterly, or as Needed

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