Helen Adams Keller was born June 27, 1880, in the northwest Alabama city of Tuscumbia. Her father was a retired Confederate Army captain and editor of the local newspaper; her mother was an educated young woman from Memphis. When Keller was 19 months old, she was afflicted by an unknown illness, possibly scarlet fever or meningitis, which left her deaf and blind.
Keller was extremely intelligent and tried to understand her surroundings through touch, smell and taste. However, she began to realize that her family members spoke to one another with their mouths instead of using signs as she did. Feeling their moving lips, she flew into a rage when she was unable to join in the conversation. By the age of six, Keller later wrote in her autobiography, “the need of some means of communication became so urgent that these outbursts occurred daily, sometimes hourly.”