Helen Keller was born on June 27,1880, in Tuscumabia, Alabama, to Captain Arthur Henry Keller, a Confederate army veteran and a newspaper editor, and Kate Adams Keller. By all accounts, she was a normal infant. But at nineteen months Keller suffered an illness—perhaps scarlet fever of meningitis—that left her deaf an blind. Although Keller learned basic house hold taks and could communicate some of her desires through a series of signs, she did not leanr language the way other children do. Indeed, her family—and most pepole at the time—wondered if a deaf and blind child could be educated at all.
When Keller was six, her mother managed to get in touch with micheal Anagnos, director of the Perkins Institution for the Blind, who agreed to send one of his graduates Anne...