Extremely rare, early ALS in pencil, signed “Helen Keller,” two pages, 8 x 8, no date but circa 1887. Handwritten letter to Keller’s cousin Anna S. Keller Turner and her husband Lieutenant George Pendleton Turner, regarding recent travels with George and “Teacher” Anne Sullivan. Simple sentences referring to herself in the third person and the lack of punctuation likely indicate that this is one of Keller’s early letters, circa 1887. Many letters dating from this period have a similar opening: “Helen will write letter to cousin George.”
In part: "George did take Helen and teacher in horse car horse did stand still…Helen did go home in steam car lady did give Helen drink of water steam car does go fasts conductor did take ticket and punch teacher did buy Helen orange Helen did put orange in medicine Papa did give Helen watermelon. Janet did give Helen bouquet Rose does grow on bush and bush does grow in garden Helen will go to Sheffield Simpson will hitch Charle to buggy horse does like sugar Helen and teacher will ride horseback. Helen does love cousin George and Anna." In fine condition, with some light soiling.
Several of Helen Keller's letters from this period are documented in 'Helen Keller: A Second Laura Bridgman' by Michael Anagnos, the superintendent of the Perkins Institution, published in Fifty-Sixth Annual Report of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts School for the Blind (1888). In that report, Anagnos praises Keller's fast progress under Anne Sullivan's tutelage: 'In the course of four months Helen mastered more than four hundred and fifty common words—nouns, verbs transitive and intransitive, adjectives and prepositions—which she could use correctly and spell with perfect accuracy. At the same time she learned to read raised characters with the tips of her fingers almost spontaneously and with very little effort on the part of her instructress, to converse freely by means of the manual alphabet, to cipher, to write a neat 'square hand,' and to express her elementary ideas in correct composition.'
Keller would go on to become the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree, graduating cum laude from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One of the world's foremost disability rights advocates, she traveled to over 40 countries advocating for the blind and those with other disabilities, and met every president from Grover Cleveland to LBJ, who awarded her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. Her life was most famously chronicled in the Oscar winning film The Miracle Worker in 1962. Her Alabama home is a National Historic Landmark.
Such early handwritten letters by Helen Keller are extremely scarce in the market. These early letters to her family members reside almost exclusively at the Perkins Institute, The American Foundation for the Blind, and other institutions.
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