1866–1936 · American teacher; Helen Keller’s instructor and companion for 49 years
Anne Sullivan (born Johanna Mansfield Sullivan, later Anne Sullivan Macy) contracted trachoma at five and grew up partially blind, working her way through the Perkins School for the Blind and graduating as valedictorian at twenty. Weeks later she was hired to teach a deaf-blind six-year-old in Alabama, and on 3 March 1887 she began the finger-spelling method that would make Helen Keller literate — 575 words and basic Braille inside six months. The partnership ran forty-nine years, through Radcliffe and onto the public stage, but Sullivan published no memoir of her own: almost everything she is quoted as saying survives because Keller wrote it down.