Helen Keller, Her Socialist Years: Writings and Speeches

About this record

1967 International Publishers collection of Helen Keller's socialist writings, edited by Philip S. Foner. Reproduces the political speeches, articles, and letters Keller wrote across her four-decade career as a member of the Socialist Party of America (joined 1909) and later supporter of the Industrial Workers of the World — material systematically suppressed by mainstream-press hagiographies that portrayed her solely as a triumph-over-disability figure. Includes her 1916 essay 'Why I Became an IWW,' her defenses of Joe Hill (executed Utah 1915) and the IWW free-speech-fight prisoners, and her opposition to U.S. entry into World War I. A foundational early-20th-century political-prisoner-solidarity text from one of the country's most famous radicals-in-disguise.