Keller, Helen. (1880-1968) American writer and humanitarian, she lost her sight and hearing after an illness at 19 months, but was educated by Anne Sullivan who taught her to speak, read and write, and became her lifetime companion.
Three Signed Copies of a Typed Letter Signed. Each, One page, Quarto, on three tones of her imprinted personal letterhead, New York, N.Y. Three copies of a stirring fund-raising letter, dated December 14, 1945, November 30, 1946, and May 2, 1949. Each is addressed to a different party, and signed in full at the bottom in grey pencil, "Helen Keller." An astonishing letter soliciting aid for a new department of the American Foundation for the Blind in which Helen Keller vividly describes the anguish of being deaf and blind. She writes, in part:
"...I am indeed happy to inform you that a Committee on the Deaf-blind of America has been started. It is to be one of the departments of the American Foundation for the Blind with which I have worked for twenty-two years. All that time there has burned within me an unceasing pain because the problems of the doubly handicapped remain for the most part unsolved, and I have made one attempt after another in their behalf ...Try to imagine, if you can, the anguish and horror you would experience bowed down by the twofold weight of blindness and deafness, with no hope of emerging from an utter isolation! Still throbbing with natural emotions and desires, you would feel through the sense of touch the existence of a living world, and desperately but vainly you would seek an escape into its healing light. All your pleasures would vanish in a dreadful monotony of silent days. Even work, man's divine heritage -- work that can bind up broken hearts -- would be lost to you. Family and friends might surround you with love, but consolation alone cannot restore usefulness, or bring release from that hardest prison -- a tomb of the mind and a dungeon of the body. I doubt if even the most imaginative and tender normal people can realize the peculiar cruelty of such a situation. The blind who are taught can live happily in a world of sounds, and the deaf use their eyes instead of ears, but the deaf-blind have no substitute for sight or hearing. The keenest touch cannot break their immobility. More than any other physically fettered group, they need right teaching and constructive procedures to reclaim them to normal society...".
Fine. The earliest of the three letters bears some annotations, not in Keller's hand, at upper right margin. Overall condition is Fine. Evidently Helen Keller kept a form letter over the years to use in fund-raising efforts in her work on behalf of the deaf-blind. Though a fund-raising letter, it is nevertheless frankly personal, and contains a wrenching articulation of the experience of being deaf and blind.
Estimated Value $500-750.
From the Gerald Burg collection.
