Helen Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama, at a family home called Ivy Green. A citizen of the United States, she grew up in the American South before her education took her further afield — first to the Perkins School for the Blind, then to The Cambridge School of Weston, and eventually to Radcliffe College, where she pursued her studies in English.

Keller worked across several roles throughout her life: she was a writer, essayist, autobiographer, orator, and linguist. She was also a political activist, a suffragette, a peace activist, and a trade unionist — a range of commitments that ran alongside her literary output. Her notable works include The Frost King and The Story of My Life, the latter an autobiographical account written in English that drew directly on her own experience. Her public speaking and writing made her a figure whose work crossed national boundaries.

The recognition she received reflected that international reach. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Order of Merit, along with the Knight of the Legion of Honour, the Order of the Sacred Treasure, the Order of Bernardo O'Higgins, the Order of St. Sava, and the Order of the Southern Cross, for which she held the rank of Knight. She also received the Golden Plate Award and was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Further honors came through the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame, the Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame, and the Labor Hall of Honor, the last of which acknowledged her work as a trade unionist.

Keller died on June 1, 1968, in Easton, Connecticut, less than a month before what would have been her eighty-eighth birthday. Her induction into the Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame ties her formally to the state where she spent her final years, a long way from the Alabama town where she had been born nearly nine decades earlier.