The Story of My Life by Helen Keller: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
The Story of My Life
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The opening of Chapter 1
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.
The excerpt below quotes the first three paragraphs of Chapter 1, in which Keller explains why she begins with hesitation, records her birth at Tuscumbia on June 27, 1880, and describes her father’s Confederate service and her mother’s family.
Download Full EPUB1903
~134,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 7.4 hours
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Tuscumbia, Alabama and Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1880–1902.
Three parts, twenty-three chapters and the letters, in eleven movements
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Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #2397 · Standard Ebooks
The Story of My Life is Helen Keller’s own account of her childhood and schooling, from her birth in Tuscumbia, a small town in northern Alabama, in 1880 to her years at Radcliffe. An illness at nineteen months left her blind and deaf, and the book follows the arrival of Anne Sullivan in March 1887, the morning at the water pump when language began, the years of reading, travel and speech lessons, the Frost King affair, and the examinations that carried her to college. Keller wrote the narrative herself; a selection of her letters and a supplementary account by her editor complete the volume of 1903, which ends with the friends who, she says, made the story her life.
The Story of My Life is the founding document of the modern disability memoir, and it is also a book about teaching. The letters printed in the second part, and Sullivan’s own papers in the third, show a method being invented week by week, and two witnesses describe the same morning at the pump, which is rare in the record of any education. — The text is available via Project Gutenberg #2397 and Standard Ebooks.
The Story of My Life by Helen Keller: Summary, Characters & Themes
Helen Keller was still at Radcliffe when this book appeared, and was already the deaf-blind person the world thought it knew. Her life had been written about since Anne Sullivan began teaching her in 1887, frequently inaccurately, and she had watched teachers, reporters and well-wishers explain her to herself. This book is her answer: the story of her childhood and schooling told at her own length, from the inside, with the letters and the editor’s notes that let a reader check her against another witness. She had been the subject of other people’s arguments since she was a child; here she sets out what she was taught and what she made of it, and leaves the reader to weigh the two. This summary and analysis follows the volume as it is printed here, in the three parts its editor designed: the narrative, the letters, and the supplementary account that gives Sullivan her own voice.
The first part is the narrative everyone remembers. Keller begins on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, and reaches, in two pages, the February illness at nineteen months that took her sight and hearing before she could remember having them. What follows is a child’s world made of touch and smell, of signs invented for want of words, and of rages she cannot control. Her mother read Dickens and the reports on Laura Bridgman; a Baltimore oculist sent the family to Alexander Graham Bell; Bell sent them to the Perkins Institution, and Perkins sent Anne Mansfield Sullivan, who arrived on the third of March, 1887, three months before her pupil turned seven. Within weeks the child who had tyrannized the household was spelling nouns and asking the name of everything she touched.
The second part is a selection of Keller’s letters from 1887 to 1901, most of them written before she was twelve. The first is a breathless run of lowercase words, sent three and a half months after she learned that things have names; the last are typed from Cambridge, about braille, politics and examinations. Between them are letters to Anagnos, to Dr. Bell, to Whittier, to Holmes and to Bishop Brooks, and the editor’s notes that place each one. The third part is not hers. John Macy, the editor, wrote a supplementary account of her education and personality, and it includes Anne Sullivan’s letters to Mrs. Sophia C. Hopkins, matron at Perkins, written during the first year of teaching, when the method was still being guessed at. Those letters were written to a friend and not for publication, which is why they show the failures as plainly as the successes.
The two accounts of the pump-house morning, Keller’s in Chapter 4 and Sullivan’s in a letter of April 5, 1887, are the heart of the book and the reason it still matters to anyone interested in teaching. Keller remembers a living word that awakened her soul; Sullivan remembers spelling four letters while cold water ran over a hand, and then thirty new words before night. Elsewhere the book is harder to pin down: Macy warns that his pupil’s memory of her childhood is in places idealized, and the Frost King chapter, in which a story she wrote for Mr. Anagnos’s birthday was found to resemble a published one, shows Keller thinking aloud about where a writer’s words come from. Macy’s account of the affair is the coldest thing in the volume; Sullivan’s, printed after it, is angrier, and the two do not quite agree.
The book has been compared with Up from Slavery, published two years earlier, and with Franklin’s Autobiography, the model for every American self-account; Walden is the other book on this shelf about learning to see what is in front of you. Doubleday, Page & Co. issued the first edition in 1903, the same year its author was finishing at Radcliffe, and it ends not with a conclusion but with a list of friends. Keller names each of them and what that person gave her, from Bishop Brooks’s religion of love to Mark Twain’s handshake, and the chapter is the nearest thing in the book to an account of what a life is made of. The text here follows the Project Gutenberg transcription, and the editorial matter is that of the Standard Ebooks edition.
Historical Context
The book appeared in 1903, sixty-five years after Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe began the experiment that made it possible. Howe, born in Boston in 1801 and director of the Perkins Institution, brought Laura Bridgman there in October 1837 and taught her language with raised labels, then with the manual alphabet. Bridgman, who had lost sight and hearing to scarlet fever at twenty-six months, proved that a mind without either could be reached, and every later teacher of the deaf-blind worked in the road he had cut. Perkins was the institution at the centre of the story: it trained Sullivan, lent its library, and published the reports that Macy treats as his first evidence.
Keller grew up inside a professional argument she later entered. Teachers of the deaf were divided between the manual alphabet, which spelled words into the hand, and oral instruction, which aimed at speech. Sullivan distrusted the second: she wrote that articulation is an unsatisfactory means of education and that the manual alphabet quickens mental activity, and she began teaching Keller to speak only when her pupil insisted. Sarah Fuller of the Horace Mann School gave the first lessons in 1890, Dr. Humason worked on her voice in New York, and in 1896 Keller addressed the association that promoted speech for the deaf. The argument was not academic; it decided what a deaf child was taught first.
The volume is also a document of American celebrity, and of the years when American education was being remade around the child rather than the curriculum. Keller had been a newspaper subject since childhood; Macy complains that exaggeration by well-meaning institutions produced a mass of controversy in which teachers proved a priori that Sullivan’s work could not have happened, and that Mr. Anagnos’s glowing reports did the facts no service. A Boston editorial read her chapters on college as disillusion, and Macy answers that the disillusion is largely humorous. Sullivan’s letters of 1887 describe the turn itself: she abandons set lessons, treats her pupil as a two-year-old who learns by imitation, and lets the day’s walk supply the vocabulary.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- Helen Keller: The narrator, born at Tuscumbia on June 27, 1880, blind and deaf from an illness at nineteen months. She learns language at six, reads everything she can get in raised type, insists on learning to speak, and enters Radcliffe in 1900. Her book is written on a typewriter she cannot read back without help, and its voice is by turns childlike, funny and exact.
- Anne Mansfield Sullivan: The teacher, born at Springfield, Massachusetts, nearly blind in childhood, a pupil at Perkins from 1880 to 1886 and a resident of the same house as Laura Bridgman. Recommended by Mr. Anagnos, she arrives in Alabama in March 1887 with no experience of teaching. Her letters in the third part show a young woman inventing a method, doubting it daily, and determined that her pupil shall not become a prodigy.
- Kate Adams Keller: Helen’s mother, the captain’s much younger second wife. She has read Dickens on Laura Bridgman and refuses to accept that nothing can be done, takes her daughter to Baltimore and Washington, and writes to Perkins for a teacher. In Chapter 1 her daughter remembers locking her in the pantry for three hours, and never being able to explain why she did it.
- Alexander Graham Bell: The inventor and teacher of the deaf who becomes the family’s door into the world. He holds the child on his knee in Washington, understands her signs, and tells the Kellers to write to Mr. Anagnos at Perkins. He goes with her through the World’s Fair, argues with her about kite strings at Baddeck, and appears in nearly every chapter of her later life, as friend rather than benefactor.
- Laura Bridgman and the Perkins Institution: Howe’s pupil, deaf and blind from scarlet fever, taught by raised labels and then by fingerspelling from 1837. She dresses the doll the Perkins children send to Tuscumbia, and she is the argument the Kellers act on. Perkins, under Michael Anagnos, supplies the teacher and the library, and Macy uses its reports as the first printed source for Keller’s education.
- John Albert Macy: The editor, whose preface is signed at Cambridge on February 1, 1903, and who writes the whole third part. He describes how the book was composed and revised, assesses Keller’s voice and her style, and gives Sullivan’s letters and papers to the press. He is also the first to say in print that her childhood memories are not a scientific record, and that her teacher’s notes sometimes differ.
Core Literary Themes
- Language as the door of the world: Everything in the book turns on a single morning. Before the pump, Keller has signs but no words: she says she was like a ship in a fog, feeling walls but not knowing the shore. After it, every object she touches demands a name, and words generate the need for more words, as Sullivan notices in her letters of that spring. Keller’s sentence about the living word that awakened her soul is not decoration; it is the book’s argument that language is what makes a person, and that teaching it is the highest work in the book.
- Touch as knowledge: The book is an inventory of what hands can know: the shape of a face, the vibration of a piano case, the sweep of a statue, the raised points of a watch, the letters spelled into a palm faster than a slow lecture can be followed. But Keller and Macy both resist the idea that her touch is miraculous. Macy says her sense of touch is not so fine as Laura Bridgman’s, and that nothing about her needs a sixth sense to explain it. The theme is knowledge, not magic, and the best descriptions in the book are the proof of it.
- The teacher and the self: Keller writes that her teacher is so near to her that she scarcely thinks of herself apart from her, and the book keeps testing that bond: the two weeks in the garden-house, the constant companionship broken only once in fifteen years, the discipline that Sullivan calls the gateway through which knowledge and love enter. The third part then prints Sullivan’s own voice, so that the reader must decide how much of the self was made by the teacher, and how much of the teacher was made by the pupil. The letters of the second part are the pupil’s own voice at nine and ten, before she had learned what her story was supposed to mean.
- Memory, imitation and the ownership of a story: The Frost King episode is the book’s most uncomfortable chapter and its most revealing. A story Keller wrote for Mr. Anagnos’s birthday turns out to resemble one she had heard years before, and a court of Perkins teachers questions her while her teacher waits outside the room. Macy adds that her memory of childhood is partly idealized, and that some of her paragraphs began as English themes. The memoir therefore asks who owns a remembered life, and answers with a rewritten manuscript and a chapter of explanation.
- The prodigy and the public: From the first newspaper paragraph, other people’s version of Keller runs ahead of her own. Anagnos calls her progress a triumphal march; the papers report her talking fluently and working geometry with blocks; teachers deny that Sullivan’s results are possible. Macy’s part of the book is written against that noise, and Sullivan’s early letters record her vow that her pupil shall not be turned into a prodigy. The memoir is the attempt to take the story back, in her own words, at her own length. It had already been serialized before it was a book, so its author read her own life in print while she was still revising it.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of The Story of My Life?
This page gives you the whole book in one file, in the shape the 1903 editor gave it. That matters more than usual here. The narrative in the first part is only half the volume; the other half is the letters Keller wrote as a child and the supplementary account in which John Macy prints Anne Sullivan’s own letters and papers. Editions that abridge the memoir to the pump and Radcliffe lose exactly the material a reader wants next, which is the record of how the teaching was actually done.
The text is set for reading on a screen rather than reproducing a printed page. Chapters break where the narrative breaks, the letters carry their dates and recipients as headings, and the editor’s third part is divided into its own sections, so you can move between Keller’s account of the pump and Sullivan’s letter about it without hunting. The apparatus of the original is kept; nothing is added, and no note tells you what to think about a passage.
You can download the EPUB, the AZW3 for a Kindle sent by cable, or the KEPUB that a Kobo reads best, and read the same text offline on any of them. Each file is a single download, with no reader of its own, so it opens in whatever application you already use. If you would rather read it in a browser first, or check a passage against another copy, the identical text is at Project Gutenberg, unmodernized and free.
- Based on the Standard Ebooks Edition, via Standard Ebooks, whose text is prepared from the Project Gutenberg transcription and checked against scans of the 1903 printing; the chapter divisions, the letters and the byline follow that edition.
- Three parts kept whole The narrative, the letters of 1887–1901 and Macy’s supplementary account, with Sullivan’s letters and papers, are all present; nothing is cut to shorten the book.
- Letters with their headings Each letter keeps its date, its recipient and the editor’s connecting note, so the sequence of Keller’s childhood writing can be followed as a sequence rather than as decoration.
- Formats for every reader EPUB for Apple Books, Calibre and Android readers; AZW3 for a Kindle by cable or Send to Kindle; KEPUB for Kobo. One text, three files, no registration.
- Up from Slavery — Booker T. Washington’s 1901 account of a childhood in slavery and a life of schooling, the American memoir published closest to Keller’s own. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin — the first great American self-account, and the model that every later one, Keller’s included, quietly rewrites. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Walden — Thoreau’s experiment in living deliberately, the book to read beside Keller’s account of learning to see the world through her hands. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The Standard Ebooks edition keeps the book’s three parts and its chapter numbers. The first twenty-three chapters are Keller’s narrative and run from Tuscumbia to her third year at Radcliffe; the letters follow, arranged by year, and then the supplementary account in which Macy writes about the book, her character and her education, and prints Anne Sullivan’s letters and papers. The groups below follow those divisions; the summaries are short enough to read first and exact enough to check afterwards.
- Chapters 1–3 — Tuscumbia and the closed door: Keller is born on June 27, 1880, and an illness the next February, at nineteen months, leaves her blind and deaf. She describes the signs and rages of the years that follow, her mother’s reading about Laura Bridgman, the journey to Dr. Bell in Washington, and the letter to Mr. Anagnos that brings a teacher from Boston.
- Chapters 4–6 — The word in her hand: On the third of March, 1887, Anne Mansfield Sullivan arrives. After the doll and the struggle over the mug, the pump at the well-house gives her water, and language opens. She learns the names of things, asks what love means, and has think spelled on her forehead while she strings beads in the arbour.
- Chapters 7–9 — Reading, Christmas and Boston: She learns to read raised letters, studies out of doors, and maps the Tennessee River in clay. Her first Christmas after the teacher came, and the canary Little Tim, are followed by the journey of May 1888 to the Perkins Institution in Boston, which she calls the City of Kind Hearts.
- Chapters 10–12 — The sea, the quarry and the snow: A Cape Cod summer with Mrs. Hopkins gives her the ocean, a wave that knocks her down, and the taste of salt. Autumn takes her to Fern Quarry and a pony called Black Beauty; a New England winter brings snow, and a ride on a toboggan that ends in a spill, with her sister on the same sledge.
- Chapters 13–14 — Speech and the Frost King: In the spring of 1890 Miss Sarah Fuller teaches her to speak in eleven lessons, the first sentence being It is warm. Two years later the story she writes for Mr. Anagnos’s birthday is found to resemble Margaret Canby’s The Frost Fairies, and a Perkins court of inquiry follows, which she describes without sparing herself or anyone else; she had written the story the autumn before, at Fern Quarry, in the first months of her new speech.
- Chapters 15–17 — The World’s Fair and New York: She writes a sketch for the Youth’s Companion, visits the World’s Fair of 1893 with Dr. Bell, and enters the Wright-Humason School in New York in 1894 for lipreading and voice. Arithmetic remains a system of pitfalls; German, French, Central Park and the trip to the Statue of Liberty on Bedloe’s Island do not.
- Chapters 18–19 — Cambridge and the examinations: In October 1896 she enters the Cambridge School for Young Ladies to be prepared for Radcliffe, with Miss Sullivan spelling the lectures into her hand. She passes the preliminary examinations, then leaves the school after a dispute over her programme, and a tutor, Mr. Keith, carries her through the entrance examinations of 1899.
- Chapters 20–23 — Radcliffe, books and friends: She enters Radcliffe in the fall of 1900 and finds college not the universal Athens she had expected. Then come the books, from The Scarlet Letter to the Aeneid; the pleasures of rowing, sailing and the theatre; and the friends, from Bishop Brooks to Dr. Bell and Mark Twain, who, she says, made the story of her life.
- Letters, 1887–1891 — the first words and Tommy: The second part opens with a run-on note written three and a half months after the first word and goes on through letters to Anagnos, Dr. Bell, Whittier and Holmes. The editor’s notes trace her writing as it becomes idiomatic, and then the campaign by which a child raised pennies enough to send Tommy Stringer to school.
- Letters, 1892–1901 — the fair, the library and college: These letters follow the tea for the kindergarten, the visit to Niagara, the World’s Fair, the public library she helped start in Tuscumbia, the Wright-Humason School and her first years at Radcliffe. They end with braille, politics, a new party dress and examinations written on a typewriter.
- The supplementary account — Macy and Sullivan: Macy describes how the book was written, what Keller’s character and speech were like, and what Dr. Howe and Laura Bridgman made possible. Then come Anne Sullivan’s letters of 1887, from the first doll to the pump-house and the summer of walks, and her papers on speech and on the Frost King.
The Story of My Life: Frequently Asked Questions
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Part of: Classic Fiction · Early 20th century
