Mark Twain to Helen Keller: Everything is Plagiarism

The accusation, the friendship, the letter...

Amanda Stern
July 19, 2023

Mark Twain to Helen Keller: Everything is Plagiarism

Years ago, after looking through old journals, I was horrified to discover that some of my thinking about myself had not changed in decades.

I challenged myself to have at least one original thought a day. Then I bumped it up to two, then three, and on I went.

But were these “new” thoughts really new and truly original?

Is there any such thing as originality? Isn’t everything just a copy of a copy of a copy, another iteration of what came before it?

Mark Twain certainly thought so, and it’s what he tried to impart to Helen Keller ten years into their friendship and a decade after an accusation that would change the lives of her inner circle.

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All ideas are secondhand…It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone, or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit, and we forget the others. He added his little mite—that is all he did.

Mark Twain

In the fall of 1891, eleven-year-old Helen Keller wrote a short story called "The Frost King" as a birthday gift for Michael Anagnos, the Director of Perkins School for the Blind.

The story was about how King Frost and his fairies were the creators of the changing of fall leaves.

Anagnos, highly impressed by the story, published it in the Perkins alumni newsletter.

This triggered a cascade of events resulting in an accusation of plagiarism against Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan of fraud. Worse was the resulting “trial” over the story that gained national attention.

The relationship between Keller, Sullivan, and Anagnos ended, and Helen Keller left the school as a student.

Below, the full story:

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