HELEN KELLER - TYPED LETTER SIGNED 01/11/1931 - HFSID 354617

HELEN KELLER
The author and inspirational lecturer sends a letter to her publisher friend Frank N. Doubleday.
TLS: "Helen Keller", 2p, 9x10. Forest Hills, NY, 1931, January 11. To her friend and publisher Frank N Doubleday who she greets as “Dear Effendi”. In part:

“Conrad calls you “Father of many books.” To me you are a thought-lighter. I fancy a book going from mind to mind, leaving glints of light like stars to mark its circuit. So your friendship, when I least expected it, came into my difficulties with magic gleam --- your hand touched mine, and my life straight-way was easier, brighter, more capable of lighting the way for others whose feet stumble at noon-day as in the night….”


“It was just like you, dear Effendi, to let me read Col. Lawrence's fascinating letter. Thank you so much. What a prodigious picture he has put into words of the North Sea and those “Sand-tussocked desolations!” The crash of those waves upon the rocks will reverberate in my imagination forever! I should like to meet Col. Lawrence sometime, he is one of the most original and romantic figures of our day, I think….”


“P.S. I am sending you the little tribute I paid Prof. Einstein the evening I met him in New York. It was a great privilege and a great joy to have the touch of such a noble personality warm in my hands. Lovingly, H.K.”

Fine condition. Framed to an overall size of 38x22.

By the time she signed this letter to her publisher, Frank N. Doubleday, Helen Keller had enjoyed a long and productive relationship with “Effendi.” Doubleday was given his nickname by Rudyard Kipling, on of his “family” of writers, who also included Joseph Conrad and O. Henry. Keller's admiration of Conrad's work is expressed in this letter, as is her delight over the writings of T.E. Lawrence, the famed “Lawrence of Arabia.”.  since Doubleday's publication of her 1903 autobiography, The Story of My Life, Keller had become a celebrity in her own right. It became commonplace for her to mingle with many of the notables of her day, including Albert Einstein, to whom Keller had earlier paid tribute in New York.

Inspirational lecturer and author Helen Keller (1880-1968) had entered her dark, silent world as a result of illness while still a toddler. When she was about six years old, her parents sought help from Alexander Graham Bell, who had demonstrated his father's Visible Speech system at the Boston School for Deaf Mutes in 1871. Bell was instrumental in having instructor Anne Mansfield Sullivan (1866-1936) sent to teach Helen how to read, write and speak. With Sullivan's help, Helen learned the manual alphabet and graduated cum laude from Radcliffe in 1904. Devoting the rest of her life to the blind and deaf, Keller lectured and campaigned for improved services for the handicapped.