Born in Tuscumbia, Alabama, on June 27, 1880, Helen Keller lost her hearing and sight at 19 months after an unknown illness, perhaps rubella or scarlet fever. When she was 6, Anne Mansfield Sullivan arrived as her teacher: Keller recounted the astonishing story of their relationship in The Story of My Life, later adapted in the play and film The Miracle Worker. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1904--becoming the first deafblind person to earn a bachelor's degree--and went on to write a dozen books and numerous newspaper and magazine articles. She suffered a stroke in 1960, and died at home in Westport, Connecticut, on June 1, 1968.

Kim E. Nielsen is Distinguished University Professor and Disability Studies Chair at The University of Toledo, and was founding president of the Disability History Association. She is the author, among other books, of The Radical Lives of Helen Keller (2004), Beyond the Miracle Worker: Anne Sullivan Macy and Her Extraordinary Friendship with Helen Keller (2009), and A Disability History of the United States (2012).