49 Fun Facts About Helen Keller

In the 1920s Keller and Anne Sullivan earned their living by appearing in what kind of show?

Vaudeville. Books and lecture tours had not paid the bills, so from 1920 the two took an act about Keller's life onto the variety stage to support themselves.

How old was Helen Keller when the illness that changed her life struck?

19 months. She was already an eager talker by then: by her own account, relatives remembered her piping 'How d'ye' at six months and 'Tea, tea, tea' soon after.

Keller wrote that her sense of smell warned her of what, hours before anyone could see a sign of it?

A coming storm. She said there was 'something of the fallen angel' about smell, a sense she felt was unfairly looked down on: by scent alone she knew what kind of house she had entered, and often what work a stranger did.

At ten, Keller asked that money raised to buy her a new dog go to what instead?

A deafblind boy's schooling. Her mastiff had been killed, and the gifts sent to replace it went instead into a fund for Tommy Stringer, paying for his place at the Perkins kindergarten in Boston.

What was the Keller family homestead called, after the climbing plant that covered the house?

Ivy Green. Keller called its old-fashioned garden 'the paradise of my childhood', and though she left at eight she always spoke of the house, now a museum, as home.

In 1925 Keller challenged which service organisation to become 'knights of the blind'?

Lions Clubs. The Lions took her at her word and made saving sight their signature cause, and in 1961 she made her last major public appearance at one of their meetings.

Before any teacher arrived, how did the young Keller tell her family what she wanted?

With signs she invented. She had more than sixty by the age of seven: a pull meant 'come', a push 'go', and for ice cream she mimed working the freezer and shivered.

Which famous inventor advised the Kellers to contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind?

Alexander Graham Bell. The telephone's inventor was a teacher of the deaf first, and Keller later dedicated her first book to him.

Keller's mother took hope from American Notes, which visiting novelist's account of the deafblind Laura Bridgman?

Charles Dickens. He met Bridgman in Boston in 1842, and decades later Sullivan studied the records of her schooling before setting out to teach Keller.

Where did Keller's teacher spend four childhood years?

A poorhouse. Anne Sullivan's little brother died there within months, and she got out by begging a visiting state inspector to let her go to school.

What did Keller later call the day in 1887 when Anne Sullivan arrived at her home?

'My soul's birthday'. It hardly felt like one at the time: within a week Sullivan had to move her wild, unruly pupil out of the family house into a cottage to teach her at all.

Which gift's name was the first word Sullivan spelled into Keller's hand?

Doll. The blind children at Perkins had sent it and Laura Bridgman had dressed it, but Keller copied the finger shapes as a game, with no idea yet that they made a word.

Which word finally made the young Keller understand that everything has a name?

Water. As it ran over one hand, Sullivan spelled the word into the other, and by nightfall Keller had demanded the name of everything she could touch.

Where on the family homestead did Keller's famous breakthrough with Sullivan take place?

At the well pump. Sullivan had taken her outside after a morning of muddled lessons, and Keller wrote that she left it eager to learn the name of everything around her.

Which institution did Keller enter in 1900 and graduate from in 1904?

Radcliffe College. She won her place by passing the regular entrance examinations, and before she had even graduated she was a published author.

Which author, a devoted friend of Keller's, is credited with dubbing Anne Sullivan a 'miracle worker'?

Mark Twain. He signed a photograph to Sullivan 'with limitless admiration of the wonders she has performed as a miracle-worker', and urged a wealthy friend to fund Keller's education.

How did Keller 'listen' to people using the Tadoma method?

Touching the speaker's lips and throat. With her fingers on a speaker's nose, lips and larynx she could follow what was said, so she could talk with people who had never learned to spell into her hand.

Sullivan's future husband John Macy first helped Keller do what?

Edit her memoir. Macy married Sullivan soon afterwards, but the marriage soured and within a decade he had left, though the two never divorced.

At ten, Keller began lessons with Sarah Fuller of Boston's Horace Mann School to learn what?

To speak aloud. Fuller gave her the first lessons and Sullivan took over from there, but Keller was never satisfied with her voice, which strangers found hard to follow.

What ended Keller's secret 1916 engagement to her secretary, Peter Fagan?

Her family's objections. The couple had got as far as taking out a marriage licence in Boston before her mother forced her to renounce the engagement in public, and she was sent away to relatives.

Which dog breed did Keller introduce to America after a 1937 visit to Japan?

Akita. She called her first, a puppy named Kamikaze, 'an angel in fur', and when he died young the Japanese government sent her his brother as an official gift.

Which famously loyal Japanese dog, honoured with a statue at Shibuya Station, did Keller ask about on her 1937 visit?

Hachiko. He kept turning up at Shibuya Station for more than nine years after his owner died, and hearing about him made Keller ask for a dog of the same breed.

Which political organisation did Keller join in 1909?

Socialist Party of America. She had been reading H. G. Wells and Marx and wanted, in her words, to join 'a fighting party'; newspapers that had praised her courage now blamed her views on her disabilities.

Keller was a founding member of which organisation in 1920?

American Civil Liberties Union. It is a side of her that school lessons tend to skip, along with her pacifism and her early support for the NAACP.

Which radical labour union, nicknamed the Wobblies, did Keller go on to join?

Industrial Workers of the World. She said she joined because party politics was 'too slow' and 'sinking in the political bog', and that the Lawrence textile strike had won her over.

In 1933 Keller wrote an open letter to the students of Germany protesting against what?

The book burnings. Her own writing was among the works thrown on the fires, and her letter warned the students that burning books would never destroy the ideas inside them.

Which five-time US presidential candidate did Keller back and count among her friends?

Eugene V. Debs. He ran his last campaign, in 1920, from a federal prison cell, where he was serving a sentence for speaking out against the First World War.

Which president did the seven-year-old Keller meet at the White House in 1888?

Grover Cleveland. Sullivan and her mother had taken her north that spring, and she went on to meet every president for the next three-quarters of a century.

Keller's 1891 story The Frost King led to accusations of what?

Plagiarism. The eleven-year-old had unknowingly reworked a tale once read to her, and the ordeal left her, she wrote, afraid ever after that what she wrote was not her own.

What is the title of Keller's 1903 autobiography, written while she was in college?

The Story of My Life. It ran first as a serial in the Ladies' Home Journal while she was still a student, and it became the basis of a famous play and film about her childhood.

Keller's magazine articles helped promote which public-health measure to prevent childhood blindness?

Washing newborns' eyes with disinfectant. Editors had treated the subject as taboo, because many cases traced back to venereal disease, until the Ladies' Home Journal agreed to print her.

Keller doubted Shakespeare wrote his plays, favouring which alternative author?

Francis Bacon. A friend's book of supposed acrostic signatures in the plays won her over, and she wrote that it pleased her to look behind them 'not to an uneducated rustic, but to a man of mighty intellect'.

Keller's spiritual autobiography My Religion advocated the teachings of which Christian mystic?

Emanuel Swedenborg. She took up the eighteenth-century Swedish visionary's teachings at sixteen and held to them for life, calling them 'my light, and a staff in my hand'.

Which president awarded Keller the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964?

Lyndon B. Johnson. By then a stroke had ended her public life, and she was unable to attend the ceremony for the nation's highest civilian honour.

Where are Keller's ashes buried?

Washington National Cathedral. More than 1,200 mourners came to the funeral, and her ashes were placed beside those of Anne Sullivan and Polly Thomson, her links to the world for over seventy years.

In 1955 Keller became the first woman to receive an honorary degree from which university?

Harvard. She was nearly 75 and far from slowing down: in the eleven years of touring that followed the Second World War she visited 35 countries on five continents.

Who wrote The Miracle Worker, the play about Keller and Sullivan first broadcast on television in 1957?

William Gibson. He reworked his television play for Broadway and then for the 1962 film, whose nine-minute dining-room fight was so physical that both stars wore padding under their costumes.

Who won an Oscar playing the young Helen Keller in the 1962 film The Miracle Worker?

Patty Duke. Seventeen years later she switched sides: in a 1979 television version she played the teacher, Anne Sullivan, and won an Emmy for it.

Which actress won the Best Actress Oscar as Sullivan, Keller's teacher, in the 1962 film The Miracle Worker?

Anne Bancroft. She was appearing on Broadway in another play on Oscar night, so Joan Crawford went up and collected the award on her behalf.

Which eye disease left Anne Sullivan nearly blind as a child?

Trachoma. Operations in her teens gave back some of her sight, but she taught Keller with weak, painful eyes and was completely blind again by the end of her life.

Anne Sullivan reached the Perkins school at 14 unable to read; six years later she left it as what?

Class valedictorian. Within months of graduating at the head of her class in 1886, she was heading south to take on a pupil nobody had been able to reach.

How did Keller produce the manuscripts of her books and articles?

She typed them herself. She drafted in braille on one machine and then copied the text out on an ordinary typewriter, and her passport gave her profession simply as 'author'.

Which state's 2003 quarter, honouring Keller, was the first circulating US coin to carry braille?

Alabama. Keller left the state at eight and made her life in the North, yet she always called her birthplace at Tuscumbia home, and the state chose her for its coin.

Keller placed fifth in Gallup's 1999 poll of the century's most admired; who came first?

Mother Teresa. Gallup drew up a shortlist of 18 names with help from its yearly 'most admired' polls, and Keller finished ahead of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi.

What destroyed the Keller archive held at the offices of the charity that bears her name?

The 9/11 attacks. The offices of Helen Keller International were destroyed along with first editions of her books, letters and photographs, though no staff were hurt.

The charity now called Helen Keller Intl began in 1915, with Keller's backing, to help whom?

Soldiers blinded in the war. Its co-founder, the merchant George Kessler, had vowed to devote himself to helping others if he came through the sinking of the Lusitania alive.

Keller, who appeared in the 1919 silent film Deliverance, counted which screen comedian among her friends?

Charlie Chaplin. By her own account, while she was filming in Hollywood he screened two of his comedies for her, first letting her feel his clothes, shoes and moustache so she could picture him.

Keller's home state sent a bronze statue of her as a child to stand in which national landmark in 2009?

The US Capitol. Hers replaced a statue of an education reformer that her state had kept there since 1908, and its inscriptions are given in braille as well as raised letters.

At 14 Keller moved to which city to attend the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf?

New York. After two years there she set her sights on college, against the wishes of many of the people paying her way.