Helen Keller's Real Name: Helen Adams Keller

Quick answer: Helen Keller's full name was Helen Adams Keller. The American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) and the Perkins School for the Blind say she was born June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama. The Library of Congress files her under "Keller, Helen Adams, 1880-1968." Blind and deaf from the age of 19 months, she became an author, lecturer, and activist, and she died on June 1, 1968, in Connecticut (AFB; LOC).

Real name and early life

The AFB names her parents as Kate Adams Keller and Colonel Arthur Keller, a former Confederate captain. Perkins adds that he also edited the local newspaper. At 19 months she caught an illness that Britannica describes as possibly scarlet fever, and Perkins as possibly scarlet fever or meningitis. It left her blind and deaf.

Britannica says she was examined by Alexander Graham Bell at age 6. Through Bell, the Perkins Institution in Boston sent a 20-year-old teacher, Anne Sullivan, who arrived in March 1887 and stayed with her until Sullivan's death in 1936. Sullivan spelled words into Keller's palm. The breakthrough came at a water pump, when Sullivan spelled "w-a-t-e-r" into one hand while water ran over the other. Keller learned Braille at Perkins, learned to speak with Sarah Fuller of the Horace Mann School for the Deaf. She entered Radcliffe College in 1900 and graduated cum laude in 1904.

Career highlights

Keller wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal, The Century, McClure's, and The Atlantic Monthly. Her books include The Story of My Life (1903), The World I Live In (1908), and The Open Door (1957). From 1913 she lectured around the world, mainly for the American Foundation for the Blind. Britannica credits her with cofounding the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920 and helping move disabled people out of asylums. It also says she prompted commissions for the blind in 30 states by 1937. LOC's record notes she campaigned for women's suffrage, labor rights, and socialism.

The AFB says General Douglas MacArthur sent her to Japan in 1948 as America's first Goodwill Ambassador. A documentary about her life, Helen Keller in Her Story, won an Academy Award in 1955, and she received honorary degrees from Harvard, Glasgow, and other universities. William Gibson's play The Miracle Worker (1959) and its 1962 film, starring Patty Duke as Keller and Anne Bancroft as Sullivan, made her childhood famous. After a stroke in 1960 she lived quietly at Arcan Ridge, her Connecticut home, where she died.

Name notes for searchers

Adams is her middle name, the same as her mother's maiden name. References disagree on where Arcan Ridge is: Britannica and the AFB place it in Westport, while the LOC note says Easton. Older foreign-language editions list her as Elena Keller.