The Story of My Life

Helen Keller was just nineteen months old when, in 1882, she was struck with an illness that rendered her deaf, blind, and unable to communicate beyond basic signs. When she was seven, the arrival of Anne Sullivan, a partially blind teacher, catalysed Helen’s learning and created a completely new way of teaching deafblind children. In The Story of My Life, written when Helen was twenty-three, Helen recounts her childhood and the wonders of a blossoming understanding of the world around her, along with her efforts to become the first deafblind person to earn a B.A. degree. This volume also contains many of her letters, and is substantiated by Anne Sullivan’s own writing and correspondence on Helen’s tuition, along with numerous other accounts. The story was later adapted for both theater and film on multiple occasions as The Miracle Worker, a title bestowed on Anne Sullivan by Mark Twain.