Midstream: My Later Life.

KELLER, Helen.

$1,250.00

Item Number: 146469

Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1929.

First edition of Keller’s autobiography. Octavo, original cloth, illustrated with plates from photographs. Signed by the author in pencil on the front free endpaper, “Helen Keller,” beneath her name embossed in braille. In very good condition with light toning throughout the textblock, lacking front free endpaper. Foreword by Nella Braddy.

Helen Keller was an author, political activist, and lecturer. She was the first deaf-blind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree. The story of how Keller's teacher, Anne Sullivan, broke through the isolation imposed by a near complete lack of language, allowing the girl to blossom as she learned to communicate, has become widely known through the dramatic depictions of the play and film The Miracle Worker. Her birthplace in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, is now a museum[1] and sponsors an annual "Helen Keller Day". Her birthday on June 27 is commemorated as Helen Keller Day in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and was authorized at the federal level by presidential proclamation by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, the 100th anniversary of her birth.