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Helen Keller: Autobiographies & Other Writings

The Story of My Life | The World I Live In | Essays, Speeches, Letters, and Journals More

Edited by Kim E. Nielsen

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Overview

Interviews Commitment, Capacity, Compassion: Kim E. Nielsen on American Icon Helen Keller
March 21, 2024

Helen Keller is an American icon whose trailblazing life redefined human possibilities. Having lost both her sight and hearing in infancy, she broke through formidable barriers to become the first deafblind college graduate in the United States, an activist and public speaker, and a global celebrity. But her most enduring achievement is as a writer. This volume gathers her classic autobiographies The Story of My Life (1903) and The World I Live In (1908) with selections from her essays, speeches, letters, and journals, most of them out of print or previously uncollected.

First published while she was a twenty-three-year-old Radcliffe sophomore, Keller’s unforgettable memoir The Story of My Life has become a touchstone for generations of readers. It recounts how, with the help of Anne Sullivan, her beloved and innovative teacher, Keller unlocked the gift of language. In one of the most famous passages in our literature, Sullivan spells w-a-t-e-r into Keller’s hand at the family water pump, provoking an electric response: “Water! That word startled my soul, and it awoke, full of the spirit of the morning, full of joyous, exultant song.” The memoir is joined here by Sullivan’s riveting journal entries charting her student’s rapid progress, which is revealed in a selection of Keller’s earliest compositions.

In a playful, reflective key, The World I Live In explores some of the many questions readers had for Keller in the wake of the memoir’s runaway success. How could she know of color or songs without seeing or hearing them? Did she dream? What was it like to be her? Upon reading the book that resulted, the philosopher William James, who found himself “quite disconcerted, professionally speaking” by its originality, wrote Keller immediately to praise her “genius for psychological insight,” her expressive gifts, and her faith in the power of imagination.

Selected by Kim E. Nielsen, Keller’s biographer and one of the nation’s leading experts on disability history, the essays, speeches, letters, and journals that round out this volume span more than fifty years to survey Keller’s wide-ranging commitments to women’s rights, workers’ rights, racial equality, and the pacifist tradition. Chapters from My Religion (1927) express her fervent Swedenborgian faith; later letters describe visits to South Africa under apartheid and postwar Hiroshima.

The volume features a sixteen-page portfolio of biographical images, including several never before published, along with all of the many illustrations that appeared in the original editions of Keller’s works.

Kim E. Nielsen, editor, is Distinguished University Professor and Disability Studies Chair at The University of Toledo. She was the founding president of the Disability History Association. Her books include The Radical Lives of Helen Keller (2004), Beyond the Miracle Worker: Anne Sullivan Macy and Her Extraordinary Friendship with Helen Keller (2009), and A Disability History of the United States (2012).

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for Helen Keller: Autobiographies & Other Writings was provided by Paula Jean (Heide) Hirsch and Roland Felix Hirsch, in honor of their children, Elizabeth, Sallie, and Paul.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

THE STORY OF MY LIFE
Editor’s Preface
PART I: The Story of My Life
PART II: Letters (1887–1901)
PART III: A Supplementary Account of Helen Keller’s Life and Education
I. The Writing of the Book
II. Personality
III. Education
IV. Speech
V. Literary Style

THE WORLD I LIVE IN
Preface
I. The Seeing Hand
II. The Hands of Others
III. The Hand of the Race
IV. The Power of Touch
V. The Finer Vibrations
VI. Smell, the Fallen Angel
VII. Relative Values of the Senses
VIII. The Five-sensed World
IX. Inward Visions
X. Analogies in Sense Perception
XI. Before the Soul Dawn
XII. The Larger Sanctions
XIII. The Dream World
XIV. Dreams and Reality
XV. A Waking Dream
A Chant of Darkness

ESSAYS, SPEECHES, LETTERS & JOURNALS
Letter to Kate Keller, February 10, 1895
My Future As I See It
Blind Leaders
Strike Against War
From My Religion
Our Mark Twain
My Mother
Lux in Tenebris
Woman and Peace
Put Your Husband in the Kitchen
From Helen Keller’s Journal
Testimony Before the House Subcommittee of Labor Investigating Aid to the Physically Handicapped, October 3, 1944
Letter to Nella Braddy Henney, October 14, 1948
Letter to Jo and Florence Davidson, August 1, 1951

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-772-7 656 pages

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N° 378 Library of America Series

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