Helen Keller Trivia
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49 free Helen Keller trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Helen Keller trivia quiz covers far more than the water pump. It starts at Ivy Green in Tuscumbia, Alabama, with the illness that took a 19-month-old's sight and hearing, then follows the arrival of Anne Sullivan, the breakthrough of April 1887, the schools in Boston and New York, the Radcliffe degree paid for by a Standard Oil magnate, and the long public life that followed: fourteen books, lecture tours to dozens of countries, socialism and the Wobblies, an FBI file, an attempted elopement, Akita dogs from Japan, and the play and film that made her childhood a legend. The easy questions are ones most people know: what she lost, who taught her, which word unlocked language. The medium ones ask about her family, her schools, her companions, her politics and her friendship with Mark Twain. The hard ones dig into Laura Bridgman, the Tadoma method, The Frost King plagiarism row, Peter Fagan, Swedenborg, Hachiko and the Alabama state quarter. It suits a classroom unit, a disability history round or anyone who thinks the story ends at the pump. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In the 1920s Keller and Anne Sullivan earned their living by appearing in what kind of show?
Vaudeville
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.
Q 02How old was Helen Keller when the illness that changed her life struck?
19 months
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.
Q 03Keller wrote that her sense of smell warned her of what, hours before anyone could see a sign of it?
A coming storm
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.
Q 04At ten, Keller asked that money raised to buy her a new dog go to what instead?
A deafblind boy's schooling
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.
Q 05What was the Keller family homestead called, after the climbing plant that covered the house?
Ivy Green
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.
Q 06In 1925 Keller challenged which service organisation to become 'knights of the blind'?
Lions Clubs
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.
Q 07Before any teacher arrived, how did the young Keller tell her family what she wanted?
With signs she invented
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.
Q 08Which famous inventor advised the Kellers to contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind?
Alexander Graham Bell
Alexander Graham Bell. The telephone's inventor was a teacher of the deaf first, and Keller later dedicated her first book to him.
Q 09Keller's mother took hope from American Notes, which visiting novelist's account of the deafblind Laura Bridgman?
Charles Dickens
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.
Q 10Where did Keller's teacher spend four childhood years?
A poorhouse
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.
Q 11What did Keller later call the day in 1887 when Anne Sullivan arrived at her home?
'My soul's birthday'
'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.
Q 12Which gift's name was the first word Sullivan spelled into Keller's hand?
Doll
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.
Q 13Which word finally made the young Keller understand that everything has a name?
Water
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.
Q 21Which dog breed did Keller introduce to America after a 1937 visit to Japan?
Akita
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.
Q 22Which famously loyal Japanese dog, honoured with a statue at Shibuya Station, did Keller ask about on her 1937 visit?
Hachiko
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.
Q 23Which political organisation did Keller join in 1909?
Socialist Party of America
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.
Q 14Where on the family homestead did Keller's famous breakthrough with Sullivan take place?
At the well pump
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.
Q 15Which institution did Keller enter in 1900 and graduate from in 1904?
Radcliffe College
Radcliffe College. She won her place by passing the regular entrance examinations, and before she had even graduated she was a published author.
Q 16Which author, a devoted friend of Keller's, is credited with dubbing Anne Sullivan a 'miracle worker'?
Mark Twain
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.
Q 17How did Keller 'listen' to people using the Tadoma method?
Touching the speaker's lips and throat
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.
Q 18Sullivan's future husband John Macy first helped Keller do what?
Edit her memoir
Edit her memoir. Macy married Sullivan soon afterwards, but the marriage soured and within a decade he had left, though the two never divorced.
Q 19At ten, Keller began lessons with Sarah Fuller of Boston's Horace Mann School to learn what?
To speak aloud
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.
Q 20What ended Keller's secret 1916 engagement to her secretary, Peter Fagan?
Her family's objections
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.
Q 24Keller was a founding member of which organisation in 1920?
American Civil Liberties Union
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.
Q 25Which radical labour union, nicknamed the Wobblies, did Keller go on to join?
Industrial Workers of the World
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.
Q 26In 1933 Keller wrote an open letter to the students of Germany protesting against what?
The book burnings
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.
Q 27Which five-time US presidential candidate did Keller back and count among her friends?
Eugene V. Debs
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.
Q 28Which president did the seven-year-old Keller meet at the White House in 1888?
Grover Cleveland
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.
Q 29Keller's 1891 story The Frost King led to accusations of what?
Plagiarism
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.
Q 30What is the title of Keller's 1903 autobiography, written while she was in college?
The Story of My Life
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.