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ALS in pencil, two pages on two adjoining sheets, 4.5 x 7, March 31, no year (circa 1890). Addressed from her hometown of Tuscumbia, Alabama, a handwritten letter from Helen Keller to her cousin, Anna S. Keller Turner, in full: “I am glad [to] write to you this morning. I was happy to see Cousin George yesterday. Teacher and I took Mildred to ride in little carriage. She cried to go to mother. Cousin George brought me bananas and oranges and apples. Mr. Anagnos has gone to Boston to take care [of] sixty little blind girls and seventy little boys. I love them. I went to ride on Tennessee River with Mr. Wilson and James.” In fine condition, with a crease touching the end of the signature.
Michael Anagnos was the director of the Perkins Institute for the Blind in South Boston, Massachusetts, and it was he who asked Anne Sullivan, a 20-year-old alumna of the school who was visually impaired, to become Keller's instructor. Several of Keller’s early letters are documented by Anagnos in 'Helen Keller: A Second Laura Bridgman,’ which was 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 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’s improvement is again addressed in the 1890 Perkins report: ‘Helen is virtually one of our pupils, as her teacher is one of our graduates, and has done her work under the inspiration and with the warm sympathy of Mr. Anagnos; and arrangements are now made by which this wonderful child will become a resident pupil. She has kept up her communication with her Boston friends since her last year's visit, in letters far superior in thought and in expression to such letters as the most intelligent seeing children of her years are wont to write.’
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 Tuscumbia 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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