Helen Adams Keller, 1880 - 1968

Helen Adams Keller was born in Alabama in 1880. At the age of 18 months she experienced a fever that left her deaf, blind and unable to speak. An extremely intelligent and sensitive child, by the age of seven she had invented over 60 different signs by which she could talk to her family. Because of this restricted communication her frustration and anger grew and were not relieved until Annie Sullivan, a 20 year old graduate of the Perkins School for the Blind, came to be her teacher. With her help Helen learned the manual alphabet, braille, the Tadoma method of reading lips and later learned to speak. With Annie as her interpreter, in 1888 she attended Perkins Institute for the Blind and in 1894 the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York. She received a B.A. cum laude in 1904 from Radcliffe College. She thus became the first deaf-blind person to graduate from college. In 1936 she moved to Connecticut where she lived until her death in 1968 at the age of 87.