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Helen Keller was born in 1880. When she was nineteen months old she had scarlet fever. This left her blind and deaf. On March 3, 1887, a young woman by the name of Anne Sullivan came to teach Helen. Anne had came to live with Helen and the Kellers after finishing school. Anne had worked with the blind and deaf before. When writing her book in later years, Helen described the day Anne came as her "soul's birthday". When Helen and Anne first met, Helen took Anne's purse and ran her fingers along the keyhole. Helen then tugged at Anne's sleeve for her to turn the key. Anne thought that Helen must have been pretty intelligent to know that much. When Helen was six years old, during one of her lessons, she hit Anne in the mouth. Anne's two front teeth fell out. Helen didn't know what she had done at the time. Anne was mad, but wasn't about to give up after traveling one thousand miles to teach Helen. People in Helen Keller's time called her blind, deaf, and dumb. This didn't mean she was dumb in the head. This meant that she couldn't talk. When people around her were talking, Helen would become very frustrated that she couldn't understand what they were saying. Sometimes she would get so frustrated that she would throw violent tantrums until she became exhausted. As she grew, Helen's behavior worsened. Once, Helen had locked her mother in the pantry for hours with her back against the door. She just stood there with a smile on her face. She could feel the vibration of her mother's pounding. In 1904, Helen graduated from Radcliff University. At age 23, Helen wrote her first book. She described her illness as "an acute congestion of her stomach and a fever left me as suddenly and mysteriously as it had come." Helen became a writer, lecturer, and a fund raiser for the handicapped. Helen changed the lives of blind and deaf people around the world. She died in 1968. |