Helen Adams Keller June 27, β June 1, was an American author, disability rights advocate, political activist and lecturer. Born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama , she lost her sight and her hearing after a bout of illness when she was 19 months old. She then communicated primarily using home signs until the age of seven, when she met her first teacher and life-long companion Anne Sullivan. Sullivan taught Keller language, including reading and writing. After an education at both specialist and mainstream schools, Keller attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University and became the first deafblind person in the United States to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.
Keller was also a prolific author, writing 14 books and hundreds of speeches and essays on topics ranging from animals to Mahatma Gandhi. It was adapted as a play by William Gibson , later adapted as a film under the same title, The Miracle Worker. Her birthplace has been designated and preserved as a National Historic Landmark.
Since , it has been operated as a house museum, [ 4 ] and sponsors an annual " Helen Keller Day ". Keller's father worked for many years as an editor of the Tuscumbia North Alabamian. He had served as a captain in the Confederate Army. Adams , a Confederate general. Keller reflected on this fact in her first autobiography, asserting that "there is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his".
At 19 months old, Keller contracted an unknown illness described by doctors as "an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain". In , Keller's mother, inspired by an account in Charles Dickens ' American Notes of the successful education of Laura Bridgman , a deaf and blind woman, dispatched the young Keller and her father to consult physician J.
Julian Chisholm, an eye, ear, nose and throat specialist in Baltimore , for advice. Bell advised them to contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind , the school where Bridgman had been educated. It was then located in South Boston.
