Helen Adams Keller was born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, the elder daughter of Arthur Henley Keller and Kate Adams Keller. When but a toddler at 19 months of age, she fell ill with what could have been scarlet fever or meningitis and shortly after, lost her sight and hearing. The impact this had on a child barely two years old is difficult to imagine as communication was all but lost to her. At seven years of age, with the help of Anne Sullivan, the teacher from the Perkins Institute for the Blind who was to transform her life, Helen learnt to communicate with those around her. Anne Sullivan, herself visually impaired, opened up the world to Helen, first by fingerspelling words into her hand, then by teaching her to lip read by placing one hand lightly over the speaker's lips. Helen went on to learn to speak, to read braille and to interpret sign language with her hands - and even discovered she could enjoy music by feeling the rhythmic vibrations of the beat.
From her early isolating years of silence and darkness, Helen Keller emerged as a world-famous speaker and author of twelve published books and several articles. She was the first deaf-blind person to receive a Bachelor of Arts degree and was subsequently awarded many honorary degrees. In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson conferred on her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the USA's highest civilian honours.
A stalwart campaigner for women's suffrage, birth control, socialism, labour rights and pacifism, she also promoted and helped establish institutions for the deaf and blind. The first (silent) film made about her in 1919 was called Deliverance and this was followed by many other movies and television serials. Keller was well travelled, both within the USA and around the world, meeting US presidents, other national leaders, famous actors and writers and people involved in the work she championed. The inventor and scientist, Alexander Graham Bell, whose work in acoustics and elocution underpinned his endeavours with the deaf, was a lifelong friend and co-advocate. The Story of My Life is dedicated to him.
Helen Keller's autobiography chronicles her life from a child to a young woman of twenty-two years.