The Story of My Life

Author: Keller, Helen

Brand: Penguin Random House

Color: Multicolor

Edition: Reprint

Binding: Mass Market Paperback

Number Of Pages: 240

Release Date: 01-07-1991

Part Number: 9780553213874

Details: Product Description
An American classic rediscovered by each generation,
The Story of My Life is Helen Keller’s account of her triumph over deafness and blindness. Popularized by the stage play and movie The Miracle Worker, Keller’s story has become a symbol of hope for people all over the world.

This book–published when Keller was only twenty-two–portrays the wild child who is locked in the dark and silent prison of her own body. With an extraordinary immediacy, Keller reveals her frustrations and rage, and takes the reader on the unforgettable journey of her education and breakthroughs into the world of communication. From the moment Keller recognizes the word “water” when her teacher finger-spells the letters, we share her triumph as “that living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!” An unparalleled chronicle of courage,
The Story of My Life remains startlingly fresh and vital more than a century after its first publication, a timeless testament to an indomitable will.
Review
“The greatest woman of our age.”
—
Winston Churchill

“Helen Keller is fellow to Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Homer, Shakespeare, and the rest of the immortals. . . . She will be as famous a thousand years from now as she is today.”
—
Mark Twain
About the Author
HELEN KELLER was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama. At nineteen months old an acute ilness nearly took her life and left her deaf and blind. At the recommendation of Alexander Graham Bell, her parents contacted the Perkins institute for the Blind in Boston, and Anne Sullivan was sent to tutor Helen. The story of their early years together, and Helen's remarkable pyschological and intellectual growth, is told in
The Story of My Life, which first appeared in installments in
Ladies' Home Journal in 1902. With Anne Sullivan, "Teacher," at her side, Helen Keller graduated from Radcliffe College in 1904, an extraordinary accomplishment for any woman of her time. A women's-rights activist, a socialist, and a world-famous celebrity, Helen Keller received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and many honorary degrees. Her other books include
The World I live In (1908),
Midstream: My Later Life (1929),
Helen Keller's Journal (1938), and
Let us Have Faith (1940). She died in 1968. Her burial urn is in the National Cathedral in Washingtion, D.C.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter I

It is with a kind of fear that I begin to write the history of my life. I have, as it were, a superstitious hesitation in lifting the veil that clings about my childhood like a golden mist. The task of writing an autobiography is a difficult one. When I try to classify my earliest impressions, I find that fact and fancy look alike across the years that link the past with the present. The woman paints the child's experiences in her own fantasy. A few impressions stand out vividly from the first years of my life; but "the shadows of the prison-house are on the rest." Besides, many of the joys and sorrows of childhood have lost their poignancy; and many incidents of vital importance in my early education have been forgotten in the excitement of great discoveries. In order, therefore, not to be tedious I shall try to present in a series of sketches only the episodes that seem to me to be the most interesting and important.

I was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, a little town of northern Alabama.

The family on my father's side is descended from Caspar Keller, a native of Switzerland, who settled in Maryland. One of my Swiss ancestors was the first teacher of the deaf in Zurich and wrote a book on the subject of their education-rather a singular coincidence; though it is true that there is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

My grandfather, Caspar Keller's son, "entered" large tracts of land in Alabama and finally settled there. I have been told that once a y

EAN: 9780553213874

Package Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.1 x 0.6 inches

Languages: English