Helen Keller -- star of an early silent film, vaudevillian, suffragist, controversial proponent of eugenics -- was first and foremost a writer. Byline of Hope is the first book to collect Keller's journalism - much of it never before reprinted. In articles for Good Housekeeping, Ladies' Home Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Times, as well as her regular column in the little-known Home Magazine (which ran for 5 years during the Great Depression in the early 1930s) Keller's name was a "Byline of Hope," says journalism professor Beth A. Haller, who collected the articles and edited this edition.
Keller's collected articles in Byline of Hope represent some of "the most genuine of [Keller's] writings," says biographer Dorothy Herrman. "This is probably Helen Keller who Helen Keller was ... unadorned by helpers."
In Byline of Hope, Haller presents and analyzes Keller's writings on spirituality, women's issues, socialism, education and children, as well as her thoughts on blindness and deafness -- and her essays on her meetings with many fanous people of the day.
Valued as much for the famous byline as for their content, Keller's articles reached a broad audience eager for her optimistic message - a message still relevant today.
Keller "offered the perfect message for the 20th century," writes Haller, a professor at Towson University, "that positive social change could occur."
About the Author: Beth A. Haller is Professor of Journalism/New Media and the Graduate Director of the Communication Management master's program in the Department of Mass Communication & Communication Studies at Towson University in Maryland, where she has been a full-time faculty member since 1996. She is the author of Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media (Advocado Press, 2010). She is also the former co-editor of the Society for Disability Studies' scholarly journal, Disability Studies Quarterly, (2003-2006). She is adjunct faculty for the City University of New York's Disability Studies master's program and for York University's Critical Disability Studies graduate program in Toronto.
