The Story of My Life (Helen Keller)

Keller published this at twenty-two, while still an undergraduate at Radcliffe. It covers the illness at nineteen months that left her deaf and blind, the arrival of Anne Sullivan, and the moment at the water pump when the finger-spelled word and the water became the same thing — the point at which language, and with it everything else, opened.

The book is also a document about teaching: much of it is Sullivan’s method, much of the volume is her own letters and Anne Sullivan’s reports rather than narrative. It belongs on a formation reading list as the strongest available case that instruction, patiently applied, is the thing that makes a mind usable.

Context: Listed under Autobiography; one of two American entries in that grouping alongside Booker T. Washington.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• Helen Keller — the author.
• Education — the book’s real subject: what a single teacher’s method made possible.