After an education at both specialist and mainstream schools, Keller attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University and became the first deafblind person in the United States to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.

[18] Sullivan immediately began to teach Helen to communicate by spelling words into her hand, beginning with "d-o-l-l" for the doll that she had brought Keller as a present.

In 1896, they returned to Massachusetts, and Keller entered The Cambridge School for Young Ladies before gaining admittance, in 1900, to Radcliffe College of Harvard University,[26] where she lived in Briggs Hall, South House.

Her admirer, Mark Twain, had introduced her to Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleston Rogers, who, with his wife Abbie, paid for her education.

In 1904, at the age of 24, Keller graduated from Radcliffe as a member of Phi Beta Kappa,[27] becoming the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.

[31] Shortly before World War I, with the assistance of the Zoellner Quartet, she determined that by placing her fingertips on a resonant tabletop she could experience music played close by.

[34] Keller moved to Forest Hills, Queens, together with Sullivan and Macy, and used the house as a base for her efforts on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind.

[35] While in her 30s, Keller had a love affair and became secretly engaged; she also defied her teacher and family by attempting an elopement with the man she loved,[36] Peter Fagan, who was known as "the fingerspelling socialist",[9] and was a young Boston Herald reporter sent to Keller's home to act as her private secretary when Sullivan fell ill. At the time, her father had died and Sullivan was recovering in Lake Placid and Puerto Rico.

On January 22, 1916, Keller and Sullivan traveled to the small town of Menomonie in western Wisconsin to deliver a lecture at the Mabel Tainter Memorial Building.

This message came with the visit of Helen Keller and her teacher, Mrs. John Macy, and both had a hand in imparting it Saturday evening to a splendid audience that filled The Memorial.

The wonderful girl who has so brilliantly triumphed over the triple afflictions of blindness, dumbness and deafness, gave a talk with her own lips on "Happiness", and it will be remembered always as a piece of inspired teaching by those who heard it.

Keller met every U.S. president from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon B. Johnson and was friends with many famous figures, including Alexander Graham Bell, Charlie Chaplin, and Mark Twain.

Many of her speeches and writings were about women's right to vote and the effects of war; in addition, she supported causes that opposed military intervention.

[47] She later wrote of finding "in Henry George's philosophy a rare beauty and power of inspiration, and a splendid faith in the essential nobility of human nature".

[48] Keller stated that newspaper columnists who had praised her courage and intelligence before she expressed her socialist views now called attention to her disabilities.

Keller responded to that editor, referring to having met him before he knew of her political views: At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them.

For the first time I, who had thought blindness a misfortune beyond human control, found that too much of it was traceable to wrong industrial conditions, often caused by the selfishness and greed of employers.

In 1915, she wrote in favor of refusing life-saving medical procedures to infants with severe mental impairments or physical deformities, saying that their lives were not worthwhile and they would likely become criminals.[38]: pp.

An investigation into the matter revealed that Keller may have experienced a case of cryptomnesia, which was that she had Canby's story read to her but forgot about it, while the memory remained in her subconscious.

In an article Keller wrote in 1907, she brought to public attention the fact that many cases of childhood blindness could be prevented by washing the eyes of every newborn baby with a disinfectant solution.

Keller described the core of her belief in these words: But in Swedenborg's teaching it [Divine Providence] is shown to be the government of God's Love and Wisdom and the creation of uses.

[35] On September 14, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the United States' two highest civilian honors.

In the 1950s, when she was considered by many worldwide the greatest woman alive, Hearst reporter Adela Rogers St. Johns told friends that she did not plan to include Keller in the book she was writing about the most famous women of the United States.

The various dramas each describe the relationship between Keller and Sullivan, depicting how the teacher led her from a state of almost feral wildness into education, activism, and intellectual celebrity.

"[78] Within the cultural context of the early civil rights movement,[79] Gibson adapted it for a Broadway production in 1959, which was praised by critics as a contemporary classic,[80] and an Oscar-winning feature film in 1962, starring Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke.

The film focuses on the role played by Emanuel Swedenborg's spiritual theology in her life and how it inspired Keller's triumph over her triple disabilities of blindness, deafness, and a severe speech impediment.

[86] On March 6, 2008, the New England Historic Genealogical Society announced that a staff member had discovered a rare 1888 photograph showing Helen and Anne, which, although previously published, had escaped widespread attention.

[91] This painting was created for a fundraising event to help blind students in India,[92] and was inaugurated by M. G. Rajamanikyam, IAS (District Collector Ernakulam) on Helen Keller day (June 27, 2016).

[93] In 2020, the documentary essay Her Socialist Smile by John Gianvito evolves around Keller's first public talk in 1913 before a general audience, when she started speaking out on behalf of progressive causes.

[100] Streets are named after Keller in Zurich, Switzerland; in Alabama and New York in the United States; in Getafe, Spain; in Vienna, Austria; in Lod, Israel;[101] in Lisbon, Portugal;[102] in Caen, France; and in São Paulo, Brazil.