The Story of my Life by Helen Keller is an autobiography that recounts Helen’s experiences as she adjusts to the world as a blind and deaf person. Helen begins the story by describing her earliest memories of sights and sounds and her memory of contracting the illness that resulted in her deafness and blindness. Helen learned sign language after her illness, but she describes the isolation she felt from the world around her and the frustration she felt while trying to learn.
At the age of six, Helen’s life changes drastically when she is referred to a teacher who has had tremendous success educating blind and deaf children. Helen devotes the rest of the book to describing her experiences learning to read, write, and speak under the tutelage of her teacher, Anne Sullivan. She describes the sensory experiences Miss Sullivan encouraged that helped her first learn words, and then learn the meaning of words, and then gain a fuller understanding of their meaning in the world around her. Helen describes moments of insight that came over the course of her learning as she was able to connect her learning activities to her childhood memories of sights and sounds. By the end of the book, the author’s descriptions of past and present come together to give the story continuity and meaning.
The Story of My Life is Hellen Keller's autobiography. Stricken with illness early in life that left her blind and deaf, Keller claims to tell her story as part of an attempt to validate her experiences with her disability, and to make the disabled subject more intelligible to the public.
The book is split into three parts. The first part recalls Keller's initial despair, as she tried to navigate life and obtain an education without readily available tools to make blind people's everyday experience easier. She finds solace in reading and writing, learning to use language as her primary tool.
Part two is composed of various letters written to Keller's friends and family. In them, she reveals insecurities about her proficiency at verbal expression, preferring the written form after finding it difficult to get feedback with which she could measure her progress with spoken language. The section is organized such that in each successive letter, Keller's written proficiency is improved. It is as much an autobiographical work as a demonstration of the fruits of her industriousness.
The third and final part of the book reconstructs Keller's narrative using the observations of Keller's teacher, Anne Sullivan, who stayed alongside her for almost half a century. Sullivan gives an account of Anne's prodigious intellect and drive, tracing her improvement from the early days, in which she picked up on new vocabulary at an exponential rate, through her later adoption of the Braille system and acceptance into Radcliffe College at Harvard.
The Story of My Life is the autobiography of Helen Keller, written in 1903 while she was a student at Radcliffe College. She describes her childhood memories prior to losing her hearing and vision, focusing on her memories of speech and early love for language. Later in her childhood, Keller became increasingly frustrated with her difficulties with communication and lashed out when she felt her sign language was insufficient. Much of the book focuses on her experiences with her teacher, Anne Sullivan, who Keller often refers to as Teacher. Sullivan was a teacher at the Perkins Institute for the Blind and started teaching a seven-year-old Keller to communicate by spelling out words and how to read Braille. By the age of ten, Keller could communicate with Sullivan and read Braille fluently, and had even learned how to speak. The book details her attempts to continue developing language skills with her teacher, and describes her later success as an honors student at Radcliffe College.
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