Helen Keller - The Story of My Life

Helen Keller and Miss Sullivan

2003 Modern Library Edition
Editors preface and notes copyright 2003 by James Berger

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

M ODERN L IBRARY and the T ORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Keller, Helen, 18801968.
The story of my life / Helen Keller.Restored ed.; with her letters (18871901) and a supplementary account of her education by John Macy, including passages from the reports and letters of her teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan/edited
by James Berger.
p. cm.
Rev. ed.; originally published: New York, Doubleday, Page and Co., 1903.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-298-8
1. Keller, Helen, 18801968. 2. Blind womenUnited StatesBiography.
3. Deaf womenUnited StatesBiography. 4. People with disabilitiesEducationUnited States. I. Macy, John Albert, 18771932.
II. Sullivan, Annie, 18661936. III. Berger, James, 1954 IV. Title.

HV1624.K4 .K448 2003
362.41092dc21
[B] 2002040971

Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com

v3.1

THE STORY OF MY LIFE

This hundredth-anniversary publication of a restored edition of Helen Kellers The Story of My Life is an important event. Helen Keller is simultaneously one of the best known and least known figures in American cultural history, and the same can be said of The Story of My Life, the first and most famous of the fourteen books she authored. Everyone knows of Helen Keller the legend, the saint, the miracle; but the substance of Keller as thinker, writer, and social critic and activistin fact, as an active socialisthas been long forgotten. Likewise, countless people have read some version of Kellers precocious and inspiring memoir of the first twenty years of her life, but few may be aware that this memoir constitutes only the first third of the book that Doubleday, Page & Company published in 1903 under the title The Story of My Life, by Helen Keller, with Her Letters (18871901), and a Supplementary Account of Her Education, Including Passages from the Reports and Letters of Her Teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, by John Albert Macy. There are today at least ten editions available of Helen Kellers memoir alone, but the complete book was last reprinted in 1954 and has long been out of print.

Why is it important that we are again able to read The Story of My Life in its original form? We all know, of course, that Helen Kellers life was a collaborative life. From the time when Anne Sullivan arrived at Kellers home in Tuscumbia, Alabama, in 1887 (when Helen was seven and Anne was twenty-one), Helens experience of the world was shared and mediated through the eyes, ears, and language of others. In a broad sense, all of our lives are collaborations, for we do not live alone and do not perceive our outer or our inner worlds without plentiful and continual contributions from those we know and from what we learn through print and other media. But in Kellers case, the collaborative nature of perception and consciousness is especially vivid; for seventy years, another person spelled the world into her hands.

The Story of My Life in its complete, collaborative form is not simply the memoir of a young deaf-blind woman, as extraordinary as that memoir is. This book is a story of an extraordinary education, a documentary of how a young womanwho because of her sensory deprivations was bereft of language and meaningful social contactdevelops language, and through language enters into the worlds of personal identity, social interaction, ethical understanding, and the broadest ranges of human feeling.

In part I, her memoirthe section of the book still widely in printHelen looks back at her life and tells us how she grew into the young woman she had become. Then, in part II, through a selection of Kellers letters from the age of eight, we see that growth year by year, and even week by week. In her astonishing linguistic development, we see the strengthening and deepening of all her cognitive, emotional, ethical, and aesthetic faculties. Helen the girl tells us, or shows us, many things that Helen the woman would become but could not recall. In part III, John Macy provides commentaries on Kellers personality, education, speech, and literary style.

The essay on Kellers education is of special value and interest because it consists largely of letters written by Anne Sullivan from 1887 through 1894, giving accounts of her first seven years work with Helen. Sullivans letters will be, for most readers, a revelation. Everyone with even a casual interest in Helen Keller shares a general admiration for Anne Sullivan based largely on Anne Bancrofts portrayal of her in the film The Miracle Worker (1962). But to encounter her voice directly in this series of letters, to accompany her as she conceives and reconceives the process of Helens education, to read of the setbacks and triumphs and of the emotional bond that grows between the teacher and student may comprise the most thrilling moments in this extraordinary book. Kellers accomplishments, of course, were incomparable, and she developed into a clear, humane thinker and a graceful writer. John Macy, who married

Anne Sullivan (18661936) was the daughter of impoverished Irish immigrants. Her mother died when she was eight. Her abusive, alcoholic father abandoned Anne and her two surviving siblings two years later. In 1876, Anne and her younger brother Jimmie were sent to the poorhouse at the State Infirmary in Tewksbury, Massachusetts. Jimmie was crippled by a tubercular hip; Annes vision was severely impaired by trachoma. Within three months, Jimmie was dead. Anne, however, against all odds, managed to obtain a scholarship to attend the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston after four years at Tewksbury. Though she was an avid student, her enduring anger surrounding her sense of abandonment and the death of her brother helped shape an intransigent personality that antagonized many at the school. Moreover, Sullivan felt intensely, and often was made to feel, the difference in social class between herself and the other Perkins students. But with the help of teachers like Mary Moore and Fanny Marrett, the friendship of her housemother Sophia Hopkins, and the support of Perkinss director, Michael Anagnos, Sullivan excelled academically, especially in the study of literature, and graduated as valedictorian in 1886. During her years at Perkins, a series of eye operations partially restored her vision, though her eyes pained and troubled her throughout her life.

The summer after her graduation, Anagnos recommended her for the position of governess and tutor to Helen Keller, and the principal and consuming acts of her life began the following year. Sullivan was quick to recognize the magnitude and the potential of the task she had taken on. In May 1887, she wrote to Sophia Hopkins, I know that the education of this child will be the distinguishing event of my life, if I have the brains and perseverance to accomplish it ().