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The Story of My Life
By Helen Keller
The Story of My Life is the autobiographical account of the early life of Helen Keller, written while she was only 22 years old and still a student at Radcliffe University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Helen Keller was born near Tuscumbia, AL, on June 23, 1880. For the first 19 months of life, she was a normal precocious little baby girl. In February 1882, she suffered an acute fever that took her hearing and her sight. Being so young, she rapidly forgot what she once knew of hearing and sight, and is today perhaps the most famous deaf and blind figure in history.
The Story of My Life is broken down into three sections. The first section is the autobiographical account of Helen Keller's life from her early childhood to the beginning of her studies at Radcliffe. The major focus is on the complete transformation wrought in Keller's life by the arrival of Anne Sullivan, Helen's teacher and eventually mentor. Sullivan was the first to trigger an epiphany in Keller that she would later describe as experiencing "the mystery of language". That said, this section also includes many interesting anecdotes of her time at Radcliffe, including events such as meeting Mark Twain and her relationship with her dog, Phiz.
Part II contains Helen's letters to family and friends, chronologically arraigned. These epistles document the expansion of thought and expression that Keller went through by displaying them directly through her writing.
The third part is a supplement to the rest rather than a standalone section. It contains an account of Helen Keller's life and education as based on the records and observations of Anne Sullivan. It contains an extensive account of how Helen Keller spoke, wrote, and performed other tasks we
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