Helen Adams Keller was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama, in 1880. As the result of an illness she was deaf and blind from the age of 19 months. In 1887 her learning began with her teacher Anne Mansfield Sullivan, and at the age of 19 she entered Radcliffe College, graduating in 1904. A well-known lecturer and writer, she published her autobiography, The Story of My Life, in 1902. Her other works include Optimism (1903), The World I Live In (1908), and The Song of the Stone Wall (1910). Keller died in Westport, Connecticut, in 1968.