Recent Readings: The Fifties and The Miracle Worker

Ann Bancroft and Patty Duke
in The Miracle Worker

It seems like a habit of mine to take a big fat book and turn it into a summer read. This year's lunch hour mental nourishment has been David Halberstam's The Fifties. When I acquired the book at a June library sale I wrote a note to myself on the first page where I usually place my name and the year I bought it. The note reads, "Still trying to understand myself and my generation."

If you were a Baby Boomer, I can't recommend a better volume than this one for highlighting the multitude of events that shaped our world going forward. Television, suburbs, rock and roll, the Cold War--what a decade.

I also generally like to close the end of my day with some thoughtful reading. Two standouts from my evening reads were The Glass Menagerie and The Miracle Worker.

The Glass Menagerie is a powerful play by Tennessee Williams which I wrote about here. The Miracle Worker, by William Gibson, proved to be equally potent. 

If you are unfamiliar with the story of Helen Keller, then I strongly recommend it. It's an astounding story that has been converted to a three-act play about a girl born both deaf and blind and the young woman, Anne Sullivan, who broke through her isolation and opened her up to the world by teaching her how to communicate. The three-act play also went on to become a film by the same name.

There's a sense in which the unlocking of Helen Keller was serendipitous. Anne Sullivan knew all too well what lay ahead for Helen if she could not be reached.  Sullivan herself had been blind, and with her brother had been put in an institution. Any number of other people could have been hired, but Sullivan had experienced things few others ever had. She also had nowhere else to go, though she hid this fact from the family that hired her.

In the 1962 film version of the play Anne Bancroft (Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate) is Anne Sullivan, with Patty Duke in the role of Helen Keller. Bancroft and Duke played these same roles in William Gibson's 1959 Broadway play about this story which was based on the book Keller published in 1904 titled The Story of My Life.

The scope of the play is quite narrow: the arrival of Anne Sullivan to assume responsibility for bringing "light" to the deaf and blind girl of an Alabama family. In addition to disagreements about how to best help Helen, there is friction between Sullivan, who is from New England, and the Southern culture which is still distrustful of the North. 

Here's a bit of trivia that's not in the play. Mark Twain took an interest in this story. It was Twain who first called Sullivan a miracle worker. Twain also arranged funding for Helen Keller to attend Radcliffe College. (I'll bet you didn't know that.) She became the first deaf/blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree there.

Keller went on to write 14 books, countless articles and gave speeches in 36 countries around the world.  

Related Link
Interview with John S. Hall, the Blind Poet of Ritchie County