Abstract

Helen Keller is experiencing a 21st century renaissance. Finally she can be embraced not as an iconic deaf-blind celebrity but as a significant progressive thinker of the 20th century. Helen Keller’s life offers much for study; she was an author, a socialist, the star of an early silent film, a vaudevillian, a suffragist, an international advocate and fundraiser for blind people, and even a co-founder of the ACLU. But no book has collected or examined her writings for newspapers and magazines until now.

The new book from Prof. Beth Haller of Towson University, Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller, remedies that.  Keller’s work, located in publications like Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, and The New York Times, spans 50 years of the 20th century. The collection also includes a little-known monthly magazine column that Keller wrote for five years in the early 1930s.

Byline of Hope gives voice to Keller’s ideas about how to make the world a better place and how to create a more equitable and peaceful America. Keller’s writings address her sensory experiences, her socialism, and her advocacy of women’s issues and moral character. Haller says that Keller’s “was the perfect message for the 20th century… that positive social change could occur.”

Website

https://bethhaller.wordpress.com/

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