Question

How Helen enjoy the company of Mark Twain?

Answer 1

Sometimes it can seem as though the more we think we know a historical figure, the less we actually do. Helen Keller? We’ve all seen (or think we’ve seen) some version of The Miracle Worker, right?—even if we haven’t actually read Keller’s autobiography. And Mark Twain? He can seem like an old family friend. But I find people are often surprised to learn that Keller was a radical socialist firebrand, in sympathy with workers’ movements worldwide. In a short article in praise of Lenin, for example, Keller once wrote, “I cry out against people who uphold the empire of gold…. I am perfectly sure that love will bring everything right in the end, but I cannot help sympathizing with the oppressed who feel driven to use force to gain the rights that belong to them.”Twain took a more pessimistic, ironic approach, yet he thoroughly opposed religious dogma, slavery, and imperialism. “I am always on the side of the revolutionists,” he wrote, “because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.” While a great many people grow more conservative with age, Twain and Keller both grew more radical, which in part accounts for another little-known fact about these two nineteenth century American celebrities: they formed a very close and lasting friendship that, at least in Keller’s case, may have been one of the most important relationships in either figure’s life.

Answer 2

Answer:

Helen Keller met Mark Twain when she

was just 14 years old. By 1895, Samuel

Clemens was in his fifties and had already

achieved worldwide fame for his

conversation, wit, and voluminous writing.

In contrast, Helen was a teenager who had

struggled to gain access to an education

despite her physical disability (she was

struck deaf and blind at $\: 19 \:$months after a brief illness). They met when a mutual friend held a luncheon for Helen, who was studying at the Wright-Humason School

for the Deaf in New York.