summary of the story of my life

Dear Student,

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Helen Keller probably needs no introduction, but if perchance you have not heard of her, here is a brief introduction.

Helen was born in June of 1880 in a tiny town in northern Alabama. She was nineteen months old and had just begun to talk when she contracted an unnamed disease, described by her doctor only as "acute congestion of the stomach and brain." The doctor 's prognosis was that Helen would not live. She pulled through, but not before the disease had robbed her of her sight and hearing.

Helen was fortunate to have been born to loving and patient (and apparently well-to-do) parents who made every effort to stimulate the senses left to Helen and to seek help when it was time to educate her. At the suggestion of a family friend, Alexander Graham Bell, the family contacted Boston 's Perkins Institute for the Blind, which sent Anne Sullivan to tutor Helen. Anne Sullivan would later be called "The Miracle Worker," and a movie by the same name would reflect the story in this book (and win an Oscar for a very young Patty Duke.)

Blossoming under Anne 's insightful instruction, Helen went on not only to pass the entrance exams for Radcliffe college but to graduate from this prestigious educational institution in 1904. Finishing Radcliffe alone was quite an accomplishment for a woman of that time, but for a deaf and blind woman, the accomplishment was nothing less than super human. Modestly, in her life story, she gives all the credit to her family, Alexander Graham Bell and Anne Sullivan.

The most surprising thing about Helen Keller 's autobiography is how literate she is. The most enjoyable aspect of The Story of My Life is her passion for books. She discusses her favorite classics which she read in English, Greek, Latin, French and German. She mentioned that it was difficult to get books in Braille, and when she was required by a course to read a certain work that was not yet published in Braille, Anne Sullivan would have to spell out the book in the palm of Helen 's hand so that she could keep up with her class. When Helen did get hold of a Braille book, she devoured it. What a joy it must have been to read to herself, possibly 50 times faster than Anne could communicate the words to her through finger signing. Helen also mentions her other "best friend," the typewriter, which allowed her to write her school papers and later her book.

Another enjoyable aspect of The Story of My Life is that if you ever feel sorry for yourself for what you don 't have or what you are currently struggling with, your deficiencies and struggles may suddenly seem minor in comparison to Helen 's.

The version of The Story of My Life offered by Girlebooks includes selected letters and reports that demonstrate Helen 's gradual mastery of the English language, including punctuation. If you do not have time to read all of them, I recommend that you scan them to see her journey from minimally literate to accomplished writer. A third section includes the reports given by Anne Sullivan, which will give further insight into Helen 's progress as a student.

There are a handful of special writers whose works truly show us what it’s like to be a living, breathing human being. Shakespeare comes most quickly to mind, and among poets Emily Dickinson may come soon afterward in her ability to make us re-perceive that “certain slant of light” that we all feel so palpably as we turn through the universe. But the writers whom I’ve always felt to be the most penetrating and thorough in their explications of what it’s like to be us are the prose writers St. Augustine and Marcel Proust.

These two writers explore the vast hall of memory and describe the sensations of human existence on a level that’s almost as profound as existence itself. Freud at his best can also show us what it’s like to feel and to perceive and to be human. Lately, though, my sense of self-existence has been most deeply illuminated by a writer who is currently much less celebrated—a writer who perhaps surpasses Augustine in her ability to plumb the mind and who even rivals Proust in her ability to describe the deepest sensations (and who does so with the possession of only three of the five senses): Helen Keller.

Keller and her writing have only come into eclipse in the past few decades; in her time, however, Winston Churchill called her “the greatest woman of our age,” and in a perhaps even more accurate assessment, Keller’s friend Mark Twain said that she was “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.” In a 2003 essay for The New Yorker, “What Helen Keller Saw” (collected in her 2006 book The Din in the Head), Cynthia Ozick writes that Keller’s current relative obscurity stems from criticism of how “literary” her writing is—“literary” in terms of being influenced by books as ostensibly opposed to being influenced by first-hand experience.

Ozick successfully defends Keller’s high literary quality by arguing that almost all writers learn to write best by reading and that all writers go into great detail about things that they’ve never seen or experienced with their own immediate senses.

After all, is it in any way probable that Dante really saw anything that he wrote about in his Comedy (a poem whose working title was Vision) or that he learned to write (and imagine) so well without reading deeply in Virgil, Ovid, or Apuleius—or in Biblical literature, whose utterly outlandish and fantastical elements created much of the template for the medieval Florentine’s “high fantasy?” And could he have designed such an elaborately tactile world and universe (and especially one that doesn’t correspond very closely to reality) without studying how people described them in all the known scientific and theological texts?

What many critics seem to ignore is that Keller probably had more tactile experience with the world than not just the majority of the world’s greatest writers, but than most of the rest of humanity. She loved the outdoors, and she strove to experience it (and to describe it) in ways rarely seen in even the finest naturalists. With the near-constant companionship and assistance of Anne Sullivan, her extraordinary teacher and friend, she rode tandem bikes and horses, rowed boats, explored the woods, climbed trees, went swimming, examined insects, played with animals, and grew to understand the relationships between the earth and sky and trees and rivers and human beings in ways that perhaps few people with sight or hearing have ever known.

Through her constant explorations, she developed a profoundly intimate understanding of how the world works, is arranged, and even “looks.” She may not have literally been able to see or hear Niagara Falls, but her descriptions of climbing the stairs down into its tumult and of crossing the bridge that connects the American side to the Canadian side—and especially of her simply astonishing experience of putting her hands to her hotel room’s window and feeling the overwhelming power of the Falls’ vibrations—allow us to see and hear this natural wonder ourselves and become convinced that she experienced them as movingly as did any of her companions.

As with her hotel window, she also had literal hands-on experience with much of the culture that we’d think of as closed to her. When she visited museums she was almost always given special permission to examine the sculptures with her hands, and this was one of her greatest pleasures. Her understanding of form and style were suffused with both a sophistication and an unjaded awe that would have made her a first-rate art critic. She couldn’t see paintings, of course, but she delighted in having them described to her in detail, and she took great interest in new exhibitions and in how people received and reacted to them.

She was also fascinated with music, and whenever she went to a church the organist would usually give her a private recital and allow her to feel the vibrations encompass her body. As anyone who’s felt a great church organ shake their bones knows, this is literally a moving experience. Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that she took singing lessons (to help strengthen her speaking voice, although she of course became fascinated with the sounds that she was capable of making) and that she even went so far as to take piano lessons (an experiment that didn’t go very far but that she greatly enjoyed).