WESTPORT, Conn., June 1--Helen Keller, who overcame blindness and deafness to become a symbol of the indomitable human spirit, died this afternoon in her home here. She was 87 years old. "She drifted off in her sleep," said Mrs. Winifred Corbally, Miss Keller's companion for the last 11 years, who was at her bedside. "She died gently." Death came at 3:35 P.M. She is survived by a brother, Phillips B. Keller of Dallas, and a sister, Mrs. Mildred Tyson of Montgomery, Ala. After private cremation, a funeral service will be held at the National Cathedral in Washington. No date has yet been set. For the first 18 months of her life Helen Keller was a normal infant who cooed and cried, learned to recognize the voices of her father and mother and took joy in looking at their faces and at objects about her home. "Then" as she recalled later, "came the illness which closed my eyes and ears and plunged me into the unconsciousness of a newborn baby." The illness, perhaps scarlet fever, vanished as quickly as it struck, but it erased not only the child's vision and hearing but also, as a result, her powers of articulate speech. Her life thereafter, as a girl and as a woman, became a triumph over crushing adversity and shattering affliction. In time, Miss Keller learned to circumvent her blindness, deafness and muteness; she could "see" and "hear" with exceptional acuity; she even learned to talk passably and to dance in time to a fox trot or a waltz. Her remarkable mind unfolded, and she was in and of the world, a full and happy participant in life. What set Miss Keller apart was that no similarly afflicted person before had done more than acquire the simplest skills. But she was graduated from Radcliffe; she became an artful and subtle writer; she led a vigorous life; she developed into a crusading humanitarian who espoused Socialism; and she energized movements that revolutionized help for the blind and the deaf. Her tremendous accomplishments and the force of assertive personality that underlay them were released through the devotion and skill of Anne Sullivan Macy, her teacher through whom in large degree she expressed herself. Mrs. Macy was succeeded, at her death in 1936, by Polly Thomson, who died in 1960. Since then Miss Keller's companion had been Mrs. Winifred Corbally. Miss Keller's life was so long and so crowded with improbable feats--from riding horseback to learning Greek--and she was so serene yet so determined in her advocacy of beneficent causes that she became a great legend. She always seemed to be standing before the world as an example of unquenchable will. Many who observed her--and to some she was a curiosity and a publicity-seeker--found it difficult to believe that a person so handicapped could acquire the profound knowledge and the sensitive perception and writing talent that she exhibited when she was mature. Yet no substantial proof was ever adduced that Miss Keller was anything less than she appeared--a person whose character impelled her to perform the seemingly impossible. With the years, the skepticism, once overt, dwindled as her stature as a heroic woman increased. Miss Keller always insisted that there was nothing mysterious or miraculous about her achievements. All that she was and did, she said, could be explained directly and without reference to a "sixth sense." Her dark and silent world was held in her hand and shaped with her mind. Concededly, her sense of smell was exceedingly keen, and she could orient herself by the aroma from many objects. On the other hand, her sense of touch was less finely developed than in many other blind people. Tall, handsome, gracious, poised, Miss Keller had a sparkling humor and a warm handclasp that won her friends easily. She exuded vitality and optimism. "My life has been happy because I have had wonderful friends and plenty of interesting work to do," she once remarked, adding: "I seldom think about my limitations, and they never make me sad. Perhaps there is just a touch of yearning at times, but it is vague, like a breeze among flowers. The wind passes, and the flowers are content." This equanimity was scarcely foreshadowed, in her early years. Helen Adams Keller was born on June 27, 1880, on a farm near Tuscumbia, Ala. Her father was Arthur Keller, an intermittently prosperous country gentleman who had served in the Confederate Army. Her mother was the former Kate Adams. After Helen's illness, her infancy and early childhood were a succession of days of frustration, manifest by outbursts of anger and fractious behavior. "A wild, unruly child" who kicked, scratched and screamed was how she afterward described herself. Her distracted parents were without hope until Mrs. Keller came across a passage in Charles Dickens's "American Notes" describing the training of the blind Laura Bridgman, who had been taught to be a sewing teacher by Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe of the Perkins Institution in Boston. Dr. Howe, husband of the author of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," was a pioneer teacher of the blind and the mute. Shortly thereafter the Kellers heard of a Baltimore eye physician who was interested in the blind, and they took their daughter to him. He said that Helen could be educated and put her parents in touch with Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone and an authority on teaching speech to the deaf. After examining the child, Bell advised the Kellers to ask his son-in-law, Michael Anagnos, director of the Perkins Institution, about obtaining a teacher for Helen. The teacher Mr. Anagnos selected was 20-year-old Anne Mansfield Sullivan, who was called Annie. Partly blind, Miss Sullivan had learned at Perkins how to communicate with the deaf and blind through a hand alphabet signaled by touch into the patient's palm. "The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher came to me," Miss Keller wrote later. "It was the third of March, 1887, three months before I was 7 years old. "I stood on the porch, dumb, expectant. I guessed vaguely from my mother's signs and from the hurrying to and fro in the house that something unusual was about to happen, so I went to the door and waited on the steps." Helen, her brown hair tumbled, her pinafore soiled, her black shoes tied with white string, jerked Miss Sullivan's bag away from her, rummaged in it for candy and, finding none, flew into a rage. Of her savage pupil, Miss Sullivan wrote: "She has a fine head, and it is set on her shoulders just right. Her face is hard to describe. It is intelligent, but it lacks mobility, or soul, or something. Her mouth is large and finely shaped. You can see at a glance that she is blind. One eye is larger than the other and protrudes noticeably. She rarely smiles." It was days before Miss Sullivan, whom Miss Keller throughout her life called "Teacher," could calm the rages and fears of the child and begin to spell words into her hand. The problem was of associating words and objects or actions: What was a doll, what was water? Miss Sullivan's solution was a stroke of genius. Recounting it, Miss Keller wrote: "We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. "As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten--a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. "I knew then that 'w-a-t-e-r' meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free. There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that in time could be swept away." Miss Sullivan had been told at Perkins that if she wished to teach Helen she must not spoil her. As a result, she was soon locked in physical combat with her pupil. This struggle was to thrill theater and film audiences later when it was portrayed in "The Miracle Worker" by Anne Bancroft as Annie Sullivan and Patty Duke as Helen. The play was by William Gibson, who based it on "Anne Sullivan Macy: The Story Behind Helen Keller" by Nella Braddy, a friend of Miss Keller. Opening in New York in October, 1959, it ran 702 performances. Typical of the battles between child and teacher was a dinner table struggle in which Helen, uttering eerie screams, tried to jerk Miss Sullivan's chair from under her. "She pinched me and I slapped her face every time she did," Miss Sullivan wrote. "I gave her a spoon which she threw on the floor. I forced her out of the chair and made her pick it up. Then we had another tussle over folding her napkin. It was another hour before I succeeded in getting her napkin folded. Then I let her out into the warm sunshine and went to my room and threw myself on the bed, exhausted." Once Helen became more socialized and once she began to learn, her hunger for knowledge was insatiable. In a few hours one April day she added 30 words to her vocabulary. Abstractions--the meaning of the word "love," for example--proved difficult, but her teacher's patience and ingenuity prevailed. Helen's next opening into the world was learning to read. "As soon as I could spell a few words my teacher gave me slips of cardboard on which were printed words in raised letters," she recalled. "I quickly learned that each printed word stood for an object, an act or a quality. "I had a frame in which I could arrange the words in little sentences; but before I ever put sentences in the frame I used to make them in objects. I found the slips of paper which represented, for example, 'doll,' 'is,' 'on,' 'bed' and placed each name on its object; then I put my doll on the bed with the words is, on, bed arranged beside the doll, thus making a sentence of the words, and at the same time carrying out the idea of the sentence with the things themselves." Helen read her first connected story in May, 1887, and from that time "devoured everything in the shape of a printed page that has come within the reach of my hungry fingertips." After three months with her pupil, Miss Sullivan wrote to Mr. Anagnos: "Something tells me that I am going to succeed beyond all my dreams." Helen's progress was so rapid that in May, 1888, she made her first trip to the Perkins Institution in Boston, where she learned to read Braille and to mix with other afflicted children. For several years she spent the winters in the North and the summers with her family. It was in the spring of 1890 that Helen was taught to speak by Sarah Fuller of the Horace Mann School. "Miss Fuller's method was this," Miss Keller recalled. "She passed my hand lightly over her face, and let me feel the position of her tongue and lips when she made a sound. I was eager to imitate every motion and in an hour had learned six elements of speech: M, P, A, S, T, I. I shall never forget the surprise and delight I felt when I uttered my first connected sentence: 'It is warm.'" Even so, it took a long time for the child to put her rushing thoughts into words. Most often Miss Sullivan or Miss Thomson was obliged to translate the sounds, for it took a trained ear to distinguish them accurately. When Miss Keller spoke very slowly and employed monosyllabic words, she was fairly readily understandable. At the same time the child learned to lip-read by placing her fingers on the lips and throat of those who talked with her. But one had to talk slowly with her, articulating each word carefully. Nonetheless, her crude speech and her lip-reading facility further opened her mind and enlarged her experience. Each of the young girl's advances brought pressure on her from her elders for new wonders and this inevitably fed public skepticism. This was intensified when, in 1892, a story appeared under her name that was easily identified as similar in thought and language to an already published fable. Although she denied the charge of plagiarism, the episode hurt Miss Keller for many years. In that period, she was also exploited through such incidents as publicized trips to Niagara Falls and visits to the Worlds Fair of 1893 in the company of Bell. When she was 14, in 1894, Miss Keller undertook formal schooling, first at the Wright- Humason School for the Deaf in New York and then at the Cambridge (Mass.) School for Young Ladies. With Miss Sullivan at her side and spelling into her hand, Miss Keller prepared herself for admission to Radcliffe, which she entered in the fall of 1900. It was indeed an amazing feat, for the examinations she took were those given to unhandicapped applicants, but no more astonishing than her graduation cum laude in 1904, with honors in German and English. Miss Sullivan was with her when she received her diploma, which she obtained by sheer stubbornness and determination. "I slip back many times,:" she wrote of her college years. "I fall, I stand still. I run against the edge of hidden obstacles. I lose my temper and find it again, and keep it better. I trudge on, I gain a little. I feel encouraged. I get more eager and climb higher and begin to see widening horizons." While still in Radcliffe, Miss Keller wrote, on her Hammond typewriter, her first autobiography. "The Story of My Life" was published serially in The Ladies Home Journal and, in 1902, as a book. It consisted largely of themes written for an English composition course conducted by Prof. Charles Townsend Copeland, Harvard's celebrated "Copey." Most reviewers found the book well written, but some critics, including that of The Nation, scoffed. "All of her knowledge is hearsay knowledge," The Nation said, "her very sensations are for the most part vicarious and she writes of things beyond her power of perception and with the assurance of one who had verified every word." Miss Keller's defenders replied that she had ways of knowing things not reckoned by others. When she wrote of the New York subway that it "opened its jaws like a great beast," it was pointed out that she had stroked a lion's mouth and knew whereof she spoke. At a circus zoo she had also shaken hands with a bear, patted a leopard and let a snake curl itself around her. "I have always felt I was using the five senses within me, that is why my life has been so full and complete," Miss Keller said at the time. She added that it was quite natural for her to use the words "look," "see" and "hear" as if she were seeing and hearing in the full physical sense. After college Miss Keller continued to write, publishing "The World I Live In" in 1908, "The Song of the Stone Wall" in 1910 and "Out of the Dark" in 1913. Her writings, mostly inspirational articles, also appeared in national magazines of the time. And with Miss Sullivan at her side she took to the lecture platform. After her formal talks--these were interpreted sentence by sentence by Miss Sullivan-- Miss Keller answered questions, such as "Do you close your eyes when you go to sleep?" Her stock response was, "I never stayed awake to see." Meantime, Miss Keller was developing a largeness of spirit on social issues, partly as a result of walks through industrial slums, partly because of her special interest in the high incidence of blindness among the poor and partly because of her conversations with John Macy, Miss Sullivan's husband, a social critic. She was further impelled toward Socialism in 1908 when she read H. G. Well's "New Worlds for Old." These influences, in turn, led her to read Marx and Engels in German Braille, and in 1909 she joined the Socialist party in Massachusetts. For many years she was an active member, writing incisive articles in defense of Socialism, lecturing for the party, supporting trade unions and strikes and opposing American entry into World War I. She was among those Socialists who welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917. Although Miss Keller's Socialist activities diminished after 1921, when she decided that her chief life work was to raise funds for the American Foundation for the Blind, she was always responsive to Socialist and Communist appeals for help in causes involving oppression or exploitation of labor. As late as 1957 she sent a warm greeting to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the Communist leader, then in jail on charges of violating the Smith Act. When literary tastes changed after World War I, Miss Keller's income from her writings dwindled, and, to make money, she ventured into vaudeville. She, with Miss Sullivan, was astonishingly successful; no Radcliffe graduate ever did better in variety than she. Harry and Herman Weber, the variety entrepreneurs, presented her in a 20-minute act that toured the country between 1920 and 1924. (Although some of her friends were scandalized, Miss Keller enjoyed herself enormously and argued that her appearances helped the cause of the blind.) In the Keller-Sullivan act, the rising curtain showed a drawing room with a garden seen through French windows. Miss Sullivan came on stage to the strains of Mendelssohn's "Spring Song" and told a little about Miss Keller's life. Then the star parted a curtain, entered and spoke for a few minutes. The Times review of her debut at the Palace said: "Helen Keller has conquered again, and the Monday afternoon audience at the Palace, one of the most critical and cynical in the world, was hers." On the vaudeville tour, Miss Keller, who had already met scores of famous people, formed friendships with such celebrities as Sophie Tucker, Charlie Chaplin, Enrico Caruso, Jascha Heifetz and Harpo Marx. In the twenties, Miss Keller, Miss Sullivan and her husband and Miss Thomson (who had joined the household in 1914) moved from Wrentham, Mass., to Forest Hills, Queens, in New York. Miss Keller used this home as a base for her extensive fund-raising tours for the American Foundation for the Blind, of which she was counselor until her death. In this effort she talked in churches, synagogues and town halls. She not only collected money, but also sought to alleviate the living and working conditions of the blind. In those years the blind were frequently ill-educated and maintained in asylums; her endeavors were a major factor in changing these conditions. A tireless traveler, Miss Keller toured the world with Miss Sullivan and Miss Thomson in the years before World War II. Everywhere she went she lectured in behalf of the blind and the deaf; and, inevitably, she met everyone of consequence. She also found time for writing: "My Religion" in 1927; "Midstream--My Later Life" in 1930; "Peace at Eventide" in 1932; "Helen Keller's Journal" in 1938; and "Teacher" in 1955. The "Journal," one of her most luminous books, discloses the acuity and range of Miss Keller's mind in the thirties. In her comments on political, social and literary matters, she condemned Hitlerism, cheered the sitdown strikes of John L. Lewis's Committee for Industrial Organization and criticized Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" as overlooking the brutalities of Southern slavery. Although she did not refer to it conspicuously Miss Keller was religious, but not a churchgoer. While quite young she was converted to the mystic New Church doctrines of Emanuel Swedenborg. The object of his doctrine was to make Christianity a living reality on earth through divine love, a theology that fitted Miss Keller's sense of social mission. Although Miss Keller's serenity was buttressed by her religious faith, she was subjected in adulthood to criticisms and crises that sometimes unsettled her. Other people, she discovered, were attempting to run her life, and she was helpless to counter them. The most frustrating such episode occurred in 1916 during an illness of Miss Sullivan. Miss Keller, then 36, fell in love with Peter Fagan, a 29-year-old Socialist and newspaperman who was her temporary secretary. The couple took out a marriage license, intending a secret wedding. But a Boston reporter found out about the license, and his witless article on the romance horrified the stern Mrs. Keller, who ordered Mr. Fagan out of the house and broke up the love affair. "The love which had come, unseen and unexpected, departed with tempest on his wings," Miss Keller wrote in sadness, adding that the love remained with her as "a little island of joy surrounded by dark waters." For years her spinsterhood was a chief disappointment. "If I could see," she said bitterly, "I would marry first of all." With Miss Sullivan's death in 1936, Miss Keller and Miss Thomson moved from New York to Westport, Conn., Miss Keller's home for the rest of her life. At Westport she made friends with its artists (Jo Davidson executed a sculpture of her) and its writers (Van Wyck Brooks wrote a biographical sketch). With Mr. and Mrs. Davidson, Miss Keller and Miss Thomson toured France and Italy in 1950, where Miss Keller saw great sculptures with her fingers under Mr. Davidson's tutelage. "What a privilege it has been," Mrs. Davidson remarked to a friend, "to live with Helen and Polly. Every day Helen delights us more and more--her noble simplicity, her ability to drink in the feel of things, and that spring of joyousness that bubbles up to the surface at the slightest pressure." In her middle and late years Miss Keller's income was derived from her book royalties and a stipend from the Foundation for the Blind. After Miss Thomson's death in 1960, a trustee conducted most of her affairs. For her work in behalf of the blind and the deaf, in which she was actively engaged up to 1962, Miss Keller was honored by universities and institutions throughout the world--the universities of Harvard, Glasgow, Berlin and Delhi, among them. She was received in the White House by every president from Grover Cleveland to John F. Kennedy. In 1964 she was one of 30 Americans on whom President Johnson conferred the nation's highest civilian recognition, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Despite the celebrity that accrued to her and the air of awesomeness with which she was surrounded in her later years, Miss Keller retained an unaffected personality and a certainty that her optimistic attitude toward life was justified. "I believe that all through these dark and silent years, God has been using my life for a purpose I do not know," she said recently, adding: "But one day I shall understand and then I will be satisfied."