Biography blind

In 'Biography of the Blind', James Wilson tells the stirring stories of several individuals who have overcome blindness to achieve great things. Wilson's writing celebrates the resilience and determination of the human spirit, showing us that disability need not be a barrier to success. This book is both inspiring and informative, a valuable resource for anyone interested in disability studies or the psychology of success.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.

This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.

Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

American author and activist (1880–1968)

For other people named Helen Keller, see Helen Keller (disambiguation).

Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) was an American author, disability rights advocate, political activist and lecturer. Born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, she lost her sight and her hearing after a bout of illness when she was 19 months old. She then communicated primarily using home signs until the age of seven, when she met her first teacher and life-long companion Anne Sullivan. Sullivan taught Keller language, including reading and writing. After an education at both specialist and mainstream schools, Keller attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University and became the first deafblind person in the United States to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Keller was also a prolific author, writing 14 books and hundreds of speeches and essays on topics ranging from animals to Mahatma Gandhi. Keller campaigned for those with disabilities and for women's suffrage, labor rights, and world peace. In 1909, she joined the Socialist Party of America (SPA). She was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Keller's autobiography, The Story of My Life (1903), publicized her education and life with Sullivan. It was adapted as a play by William Gibson, later adapted as a film under the same title, The Miracle Worker. Her birthplace has been designated and preserved as a National Historic Landmark. Since 1954, it has been operated as a house museum, and sponsors an annual "Helen Keller Day".

Early childhood and illness

Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama, the daughter of Arthur Henley Keller (1836–1896), and Catherine Everett (Adams) Keller (1856–1921), known as "Kate". The Keller family lived on a homestead, Ivy Green, which her paternal grandfather had built

Avoiding the impulse to create “inspiration porn”—narratives that highlight the overcoming of obstacles in order to make sighted people feel uplifted and grateful for what they have—out of one’s life about blindness in an ocularcentric world is not easy.

Blind memoirs that manage to make the reader think about biases and assumptions about blindness, rather than feeling sad or inspired, are the backbone of my personal and cultural history of blindness, There Plant Eyes. It’s important to me to juxtapose the lives of many kinds of actual blind people with the engrained and ubiquitous images of blindness and blind characters in literary, cinematic, religious, philosophical, and scientific constructions over roughly three millennia of Western culture. These images have been created, almost exclusively, by sighted people and tend to oscillate dramatically between idealizing archetypes such as the blind poet (Homer) and blind prophet (Tiresias), on the one hand, and pitying or wanting to cure actual blind people, on the other. 

Although the blind memoirists that have helped to shape my own understanding of blindness are each very different, some similarities of experience rise to the conscious surface when they are read side by side. Perhaps the most dominant takeaway from many of these first-person accounts is that the stigma of blindness is often more debilitating than the blindness itself. Beyond that, however, what is important to me in reading blind memoirs is that these many different kinds of lives show how there are as many ways of being blind as there are of being sighted. I want to celebrate the diversity amongst us, because blindness seems an identity set apart—as if we are not also women, people of color, gay, scientists, artists, punks, and parents—leaving us with blind caricatures that are flattened and monolithic and wholly devoid of real blind experiences.

The World I Live In by Helen Keller

Our society rarely acknowledges how pissed of