In The Story of My Life, author and activist Helen Keller recounts her early education with Anne Sullivan from the Perkins Institute for the Blind. An illness left Keller deaf and blind at eighteen months, and she's unable to communicate until Sullivan teaches her the manual alphabet. The Story of My Life is far from the cry for help that it might easily have been. The tone is one of joy. Keller emphasizes her early love of language. She recalls learning to speak before she lost her ability to see or hear and her desperate attempts to reawaken this ability. Throughout the book, there is a strong emphasis on her love of language, especially the written word, which was, after all, one of the few ways she had of relating to the outside world.