Helen Keller Gestures Toward Anne Sullivan

(Original Caption) Born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama, Helen Keller was stricken nineteen months later by a strange disease that left her both blind and deaf. She began a life of loneliness in the sudden silence and blackness of a strange world. On March 3, 1887, a twenty-one-year-old girl, Anne Sullivan, daughter of Irish immigrants, who had been half-blind herself as a child, arrived at the Keller's household. "That date," Helen later remarked "was my soul's birthday." Then began the formal training of seven-year-old Helen Keller that eventually made her one of the best educated women in the world. Above she is shown (foreground), age 13, with "Teacher" Anne Sullivan in 1893.