Helen Keller: A True Author

            Helen Adams Keller was born on June 27, 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama.  Unfortunately, she was diagnosed with a terrible fever that caused her to go blind and deaf before the age of two.  Her parents hired Anne Sullivan as a tutor to teach Helen how to communicate with the outside world via sign language.  Helen started writing books towards the end of her college days because of a sudden epiphany and didn’t stop until just a few years before her death in 1968.  She had written several books in her lifetime, all of them were autobiographies because she didn’t really have anything else to write about.  Her first book written was The Story of My Life which was an autobiography written in 1903 about the time she was in college.

Helen was also spiritual, she said she knew that God always existed but didn’t know what to call him.  She wrote a book called My Religion but the name was later changed to Light in my Darkness, and it was centered on her theologian who taught her about her beliefs

When Helen was eight years old she wanted to talk, she knew this goal was outstanding because no deaf blind person had ever learned to speak.  Anne now had the responsibility of teaching a deaf blind person how to talk.  Helen would touch Anne’s mouth, lips, tongue, and vocal chords to feel how each sound was said, and then she would try to repeat.  After several years of this, she could finally speak but it was terribly difficult to understand what she was trying to say.  Although she was hard to understand, this is still magnificent because she was the first deaf blind person to speak.  This also showed how hard Helen was willing to work to accomplish her goals.

 As Helen grew older she realized that she was in a world of her own and knew that she needed to do something with her life.  Helen attended Radcliffe College and graduated in 1904 at the age of 24. After that point, she had realized that she needed to find a way to live her life to the fullest while being blind and deaf.  Now that she was out of college she had to decide what the theme of her life should be.  She had an epiphany and decided that writing books was a great way to try to get others to know what life was like for her.