Helen Keller’s well-known autobiography, “The Story of My Life,” was written while she was in college and published in 1903. Much less known is her shorter autobiography, “My Story,” which she wrote at age 12 especially for a magazine called “Youth’s Companion.” As Helen Keller explained in her 1903 autobiography: “[Miss Sullivan] persuaded me to write for the ‘Youth’s Companion’ a brief account of my life. I was then twelve years old. As I look back on my struggle to write that little story, it seems to me that I must have had a prophetic vision of the good that would come of the undertaking, or I should surely have failed. I wrote timidly, fearfully, but resolutely, urged on by my teacher.” When “Youth’s Companion” published the four-part account, Helen Keller was not yet well known, and her story was prefaced by the explanatory remark: “Written wholly without help of any sort by Helen Keller, a deaf and blind girl, twelve years old, and printed without change.”
This Nook edition, equivalent in length to a physical book of approximately 16 pages, includes the complete text of the very rare autobiography of 12-year-old Helen Keller, “My Story.”
Sample passage:
I was born twelve years ago, one bright June morning, in Tuscumbia, a pleasant little town in the northern part of Alabama. The beginning of my life was very simple, and very much like the beginning of every other little life; for I could see and hear when I first came to live in this beautiful world. But I did not notice anything in my new home for several days. Content in my mother’s tender arms I lay, and smiled as if my little heart were filled with sweetest memories of the world I just had left.
I like to think I lived with God in the beautiful Somewhere before I came here, and that is why I always knew God loved me, even when I had forgotten his name.
But when I did begin to notice things, my blue eyes were filled with wondering joy. I gazed long at the lovely, deep-blue sky, and stretched out my tiny hands for the golden sunbeams that came to play hide-and-seek with me. So my happy baby hours went. I grew and cried and laughed, as all infants do.
