Helen Keller: A Life
by Dorothy Herrmann
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Book Summary Information
Author: Dorothy HerrmannEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-12-15
ISBN: 0226327639
Number of pages: 414
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Book Reviews of Helen Keller: A Life
Book Review: A long life of service
Summary: 5 Stars
The facts of Helen Keller's early life are widely known, thanks to the 1959 stage play (and later film) by William Gibson, The Miracle Worker. There are a number of excellent biographies detailing Helen's later life, and in fact her own autobiographical books remain in print and testify to her wide interests and sometimes startling achievements. Biographer Dorothy Herrmann's Helen Keller: A Life, first published in 1999, is a comprehensive addition to the canon.
Helen Keller was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama in 1880. At the age of nineteen months she was stricken with scarlet fever--or perhaps rubella or meningitis, according to Herrmann--and was left blind, deaf and mute. When she was seven years old she was released from her isolation by the young Annie Sullivan who taught her to communicate by spelling into her hand.
Annie stayed on as teacher, translator, editor and companion until her death in 1936, after which the torch was passed to other companion-caregivers. Helen spent some time at the Perkins Institute for the Blind, always primarily under Annie's tutelage, and later was admitted to Radcliffe College, becoming the first deaf blind person ever awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree. In spite of the difficulties that writing and editing presented to her, Helen wrote a number of books and articles throughout her life. She had close relationships with Alexander Graham Bell, Samuel Clemens, and a number of other notables of her time. Earning a living for herself and her entourage was always a necessity for Helen, and she spent four years on the vaudeville circuit with an act detailing her life and accomplishments. She also earned a living through writing and extensive lecturing (with the assistance of Annie Sullivan, who interpreted for her). In later life she became a fundraiser for the American Foundation for the Blind, and traveled extensively around the world on speaking and fundraising tours. She did this work until she was incapacitated by a series of strokes, six years before her death in 1968 at nearly 88 years of age.
Helen's passion for better opportunities for the disabled led her to the same desire for the working classes; she was a radical socialist, suffragist, member of the activist labor union International Workers of the World (the Wobblies), and a pacifist who opposed the U.S. entry into the First World War.
Author Herrmann thoroughly details the point of view that Helen, dependent as she was on her companions to "frame" the world for her, was to some extent a construct of those companions. Herrmann maintains that Helen was presented to the world as a "secular saint" because that's what the world wanted to see in a handicapped person. Her radical political attitudes, which themselves are attributed largely to Annie's husband John Macy, were a source of embarrassment to Helen's family and her benefactors, and eventually to the Foundation for the Blind which suppressed mention of them as much as possible. The Foundation also in later years controlled all photos of Helen and only allowed publication of those which made her look sweet, happy--and "normal."
Helen, for all the wonderful achievements of her life and the awards that were bestowed on her, was never able to live independently. Herrmann finishes with the factors that influence a deaf-blind person's possibilities. Those who are raised deaf and later become blind (or vice versa), for example, are in a different situation from those deaf and blind from birth. She briefly outlines modern teaching philosophies that allow the deaf-blind to live more independent lives, and mentions a number of high-achieving deaf-blind people who have benefited from them.
Helen Keller was a child of her time. Once the life of a Southern belle was taken from her by disability, her outlook was extremely grim--until Annie Sullivan came into her life. However the credit for Helen's accomplishments is divided up, whatever the truth behind the legend, she must be recognized as one of the outstanding women of her age. Dorothy Herrmann asks many questions that can't be answered, and that's not a bad thing in a biography of a woman so well-documented but so unknowable.
I listened to the unabridged audio of this book (which is not available through Amazon), read by Mary Peiffer.
Linda Bulger, 2009
Summary of Helen Keller: A Life
Dorothy Herrmann's powerful biography of Helen Keller tells the whole story of the controversial and turbulent relationship between Helen and her teacher, Annie Sullivan. Herrmann also chronicles Helen's doomed love affair, her struggles to earn a living, her triumphs at Radcliffe College, and her work as an advocate for the disabled. Helen Keller has been venerated as a saint or damned as a fraud, but Herrmann shows her to have been a beautiful, intelligent, high-strung, and passionate woman whose life was transformed not only by her disabilities but also by the remarkable people on whose help and friendship she relied.
"Fascinating. . . . Stripping away decades of well-meaning sentimentality, Herrmann presents a pair of strong-willed women, who struggled to build their own lives while never forgetting their dependence on each other."?Ron Charles, Christian Science Monitor
"We meet an entirely unexpected Helen Keller?a woman with deep if concealed ambivalence toward her self-sacrificing teacher; a political radical; and a woman longing for romantic love and the fulfilled sexual life of a woman."?Joan Mellen, Philadelphia Inquirer
"Herrmann's portrait of Keller is both fully embodied and unflinchingly candid."?Mary Loeffelholz, Boston Sunday Globe
"This well-proportioned biography of the deaf and blind girl who became a great American crusader rescues its subject from the shackles of sainthood without destroying her as an American hero."?Dennis Drabelle, Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Herrmann's engrossing biography helps us see beyond the public's fascination with how Keller dealt with her disabilities to discover the woman Keller strived to be."?Nancy Seidman, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Perhaps the most intimate biography [of Helen Keller]. [Herrmann] gives her back her sexuality [and] imbues her with a true humanity. . . . Helen Keller: A Life has some of the texture and the dramatic arc of a good novel."?Dinitia Smith, New York Times
"Fascinating. . . . Stripping away decades of well-meaning sentimentality, Herrmann presents a pair of strong-willed women, who struggled to build their own lives while never forgetting their dependence on each other."?Ron Charles, Christian Science Monitor
"We meet an entirely unexpected Helen Keller?a woman with deep if concealed ambivalence toward her self-sacrificing teacher; a political radical; and a woman longing for romantic love and the fulfilled sexual life of a woman."?Joan Mellen, Philadelphia Inquirer
"Herrmann's portrait of Keller is both fully embodied and unflinchingly candid."?Mary Loeffelholz, Boston Sunday Globe
"This well-proportioned biography of the deaf and blind girl who became a great American crusader rescues its subject from the shackles of sainthood without destroying her as an American hero."?Dennis Drabelle, Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Herrmann's engrossing biography helps us see beyond the public's fascination with how Keller dealt with her disabilities to discover the woman Keller strived to be."?Nancy Seidman, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Perhaps the most intimate biography [of Helen Keller]. [Herrmann] gives her back her sexuality [and] imbues her with a true humanity. . . . Helen Keller: A Life has some of the texture and the dramatic arc of a good novel."?Dinitia Smith, New York Times
William Gibson's The Miracle Worker is justly celebrated for its dramatic depiction of the innovative techniques by which Annie Sullivan taught Helen Keller, who was deaf and blind, to communicate with the outside world. Now, Dorothy Herrmann's solid, readable biography of Keller reveals that the 7-year-old, who was liberated from her isolation in 1887, grew up to be a strong-willed, tough-minded, intellectually independent woman--not at all the "plaster saint" her teacher liked to present to the public. Throughout her long life (1880-1968), Keller worked tirelessly to promote the interests of the handicapped, but she was also an avowed socialist who believed that working-class people deserved a larger share of America's wealth and a racial egalitarian whose support of civil rights horrified her genteel Southern family. Veteran biographer Herrmann paints a nuanced portrait of Keller's complex relationship with Sullivan, which included anger and resentment as well as devoted affection, and she vividly depicts the maddening constraints imposed by society's image of Keller as a perfect Victorian maiden, virginal and selfless, when in fact she had an ego and a sex drive no different from those of hearing and sighted people. The book abounds in colorful touches such as Keller's delight in performing on the vaudeville circuit--her admirers were scandalized by this vulgar display to earn money. She adored "the warm tide of human life pulsing round and round me." Candidly acknowledging Keller's frustrations and some of her less-than-sterling qualities, Herrmann gives readers a flesh-and-blood woman whose achievements are all the more remarkable. --Wendy Smith
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