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The Miracle Worker, the inspirational 1959 William Gibson play now being revived on Broadway, tells the story of Helen Keller, deaf and blind since she was a toddler, learning how to communicate with the world. Her teacher, Annie Sullivan, though little more than a child herself, is the miracle worker of the title — the one who never gives up on her, the only one convinced that this feral child can live a productive life.

The story of this transformation from small animal to human being is even more remarkable when you know that Sullivan and Keller were not fictional products of a writer's imagination, but real women who both went on to lives of great distinction.

Born on a plantation in Tuscumbia, AL, in June of 1880, Keller's handicaps effectively cut her off from the world around her. Her mother sought advice from the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, who had a particular interest in deaf children. He suggested she contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind, where Annie Sullivan, herself partially sighted, was a pupil. The remarkable union of these two strong-minded women was to change the way America and the world regarded the disabled.

	Helen Keller

An activist for many causes, she was a close friend of both Mark Twain and Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleston Rogers, who admired her enough to pay for her education. Her interests were many and varied. Some were connected with finding better services for the blind and deaf — she founded Helen Keller International, an organization devoted to research into vision, health and nutrition — but many were concerned with wider issues of social and political reform. She was an early suffragette and campaigned tirelessly for women's rights, even becoming a champion for birth control when it was considered in some circles to be blasphemous. Continued...