Summary
The story of Helen Keller, the young girl who triumphed over deafness and blindness, has been indelibly marked into our cultural consciousness. That triumph, shared with her teacher Anne Sullivan, has been further popularized by the play and movie The Miracle Worker. Yet the astonishing original version of Keller's and Sullivan's story, first published in 1903, has been out of print for many years and lost to the public.
Now, one hundred years after its initial publication, eminent literary scholar Roger Shattuck, in collaboration with Keller biographer Dorothy Herrmann, has reedited the book to reflect more accurately its original composition. Keller's remarkable acquisition of language is presented here in three successive accounts: Keller's own version; the letters of "teacher" Anne Sullivan, submerged in the earliest edition; and the valuable documentation by their young assistant, John Macy. Including opening and closing commentary by Shattuck and notes by Hermann, this volume will stand for years as the definitive edition of a classic work.
Helen Keller was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama, in 1880. Before her second birthday, a mysterious illness left her deaf and blind. She graduated with honors from Radcliffe College in 1904, one year after the initial publication of The Story of My Life, and was the author of thirteen books. She died in 1968
Roger Shattuck, author of Forbidden Knowledge and The Banquet Years, won the National Book Award for a work about Marcel Proust. University Professor Emeritus at Boston University, Shattuck lives in Vermont
Dorothy Herrmann is the author of Helen Keller: A Life and of three other biographies. She lives in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and New York City
