eBook downloads, eBook resources & eBook authors
A photobiography of Annie Sullivan, a woman who overcame her own disabilities to become an educational pioneer and life-long teacher to Helen Keller.
At the heart of this wonderful biography is the brilliantly portrayed relationship between two great American women whose lives were bound together for all time. "Something fascinating on every page . . . a deeply absorbing portrait of two intertwined lives".--"The New York Times Book Review". Photos.
Most people know the story of Helen Keller who at the age of nineteen months had an illness that left her blind and deaf. A teacher was hired for Helen when she was six years old by the name of Anne Sullivan. Anne Sullivan (Macy) taught Helen how to communicate and acted as Helens eyes and ears for fifty years. She guided Helen through several schools, and ultimately Helen graduated from Radcliffe College with honors. Helen Keller, with Anne by her side, achieved worldwide fame for her work on behalf of the blind. The story of Anne Sullivan (Macy) is not well known. As a child, she herself was blind as well as poor, abused by her father, and lived for five years in an almshouse (poorhouse). This biography of Anne Sullivan (Macy) tells her story as she may have told it.
After many years, historian and Helen Keller expert Kim Nielsen realized that she, along with other historians and biographers, had failed Anne Sullivan Macy. While Macy is remembered primarily as Helen Keller's teacher and mythologized as a straightforward educational superhero, the real story of this brilliant, complex, and misunderstood woman, who described herself as a "badly constructed human being," has never been completely told. Beyond the Miracle Worker, the first biography of Macy in nearly fifty years, complicates the typical Helen-Annie "feel good" narrative in surprising ways. By telling the life from Macy's perspective-not Keller's-the biography is the first to put Macy squarely at the center of the story. It presents a new and fascinating tale about a wounded but determined woman and her quest for a successful, meaningful life. Born in 1866 to poverty-stricken Irish immigrants, the parentless and deserted Macy suffered part of her childhood in the Massachusetts State Almshouse at Tewksbury. Seeking escape, in love with literature, and profoundly stubborn, she successfully fought to gain an education at the Perkins School for the Blind. As an adult, Macy taught Keller, helping the girl realize her immense potential, and Macy's intimate friendship with Keller remained powerful throughout their lives. Yet as Macy floundered with her own blindness, ill health, and depression, as well as a tumultuous and triangulated marriage, she came to lean on her former student, emotionally, physically, and economically. Based on privately held primary source material, including materials at both the American Foundation for the Blind and the Perkins School for the Blind, Beyond the Miracle Worker is revelatory and absorbing, unraveling one of the best known-and least understood-friendships of the twentieth century. From the Hardcover edition.
