Welcome to the American Story. Mostly true stories about what it is that makes America beautiful.

Heartbreaking, funny, inspiring, and endlessly interesting.

This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute.

I call this one, Finger-Tip Memories

Helen Keller was 14 years old when she first met the world famous Mark Twain in 1894.

They became fast friends.

He helped arrange for her to go to college at Radcliffe,

where she graduated in 1904,

the first deaf and blind person in the world

to earn a Bachelor of arts degree.

She learned to read English, French, German, and Latin in Braille and

went on to become practically as world famous as her dear friend, writing prolificly and lecturing across the country and around the world.

Twain, with his usual understatement, called her one of the two most remarkable people in the 19th century.

The other candidate was Napoleon.

Keller lived into the 1960s

and shared some of her fond memories of Twain in an

autobiography book she published in 1929. In particular, she records recollections

from her last visit to her friend in his Stormfield home in Redding, Connecticut, which she thought of as a land of enchantment.

She preserves for us a vivid

a vivid image not only of Mark Twain, Mr Clemens as she called him,

but of her own vivacious mind.

About Twain she writes,

...