Presenting the Large Print edition of The Story of My Life by Helen Keller.
Unique among vital and inspirational large print books for children and readers of all ages, Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life is an unforgettable and moving addition to every library, charting the development of her earliest years as she grew to know her world to her discovering her incredible talents in spite of her deafness and blindness.
Helen Keller was born on Ivy Green homestead in Tuscumbia, Alabama, on June 27, 1880. At 19 months old she contracted an unknown illness described by doctors as “an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain” (possibly scarlet fever or meningitis), and the illness left her both deaf and blind. In the early years of childhood, she learned many signs, and how to tell who was walking near her by the vibrations of their footsteps. Inspired by an account in Charles Dickens’ American Notes of the education of Laura Bridgman (who was also deaf and blind), Keller’s mother sent her to see specialist J. Julian Chisholm in Baltimore, who referred them to Alexander Graham Bell, who was then working with deaf children.
Bell told them to contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind in South Boston (where Bridgman had been educated), and the school’s director Michael Anagnos asked visually impaired former student Anne Sullivan to become Keller’s instructor. After early struggles, their relationship blossomed, and in time Keller (accompanied by Sullivan) would attend the Perkins Institute for the Blind, the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf, the Horace Mann School for the Deaf, The Cambridge School for Young Ladies, then Radcliffe College, Harvard University. In 1904, Keller graduated from Radcliffe, becoming the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. She became proficient using braille, reading lips with her hands, and also in speech, giving talks and lectures throughout the course of her life. She remained a close companion of Sullivan’s up to her death in 1936, also forging a close friendship—following Sullivan’s marriage to John Macy in 1905—with her housekeeper (and, later, her secretary) Polly Thomson.
Keller wrote twelve books, including the popular autobiographical works The Story of My Life (1903) and The World I Live In (1908), as well as a number of articles. After suffering a series of strokes in 1961, she spent the last years of her life at her home. In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and at the 1965 New York World’s Fair she was elected to the National Women’s Hall of Fame. On June 1, 1968, just short of her eighty-eighth birthday, she died in her sleep at her home of Arcan Ridge in Easton, Connecticut. Her ashes were interred (beside Anne Sullivan and Polly Thomson) at the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.
