Helen Keller begins her story by noting that autobiographies are difficult to write. Her memories will necessarily be imperfect, and it is difficult to separate fact from fantasy in examining one’s own childhood. She will therefore confine herself to a series of sketches illustrating “the most interesting and important” episodes.

Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Her ancestors were Swiss, and one of them was a teacher of the deaf who wrote a book on the subject. Her grandfather settled in Alabama, and her father and members of her mother’s family fought in the Confederate Army during the Civil War.

Keller was an “eager, self-asserting” child who learned to speak at the age of six months and to walk after a year. However, in the February of her second year, she fell seriously ill, and the doctor in attendance thought she would die. The illness passed, and her family rejoiced at her survival, but she would never see or hear again.

Keller does not remember what happened immediately after her illness. She soon learned to make signs for the purposes of basic communication: nodding or shaking her head, pushing and pulling. However, she realized that she was different from other people, who talked with their mouths. Sometimes, she would touch the lips of people when they talked, growing frustrated at her own lack of understanding. She was often naughty and even occasionally violent. Her best friend was Martha Washington, the daughter of the family’s cook, and the two of them often got into trouble, stealing a cake from the kitchen and making themselves sick by eating it all, or cutting off each other’s hair. After her teacher, Miss Sullivan (of whom she has not yet spoken except to record this incident) arrived, Keller locked her in one of the upstairs rooms and refused to produce the key. Her father had to rescue Miss Sullivan with a ladder. Keller describes her father as loving and indulgent. His death in 1896 was the first great sorrow of her life.

When Helen Keller was about six years old, her parents took her to see an eminent oculist in Baltimore. Dr. Chisholm could do nothing to restore her sight but pointed out that a blind and deaf child could still be educated, advising them to consult Dr. Alexander Graham Bell. Dr. Bell referred Keller’s father to the Perkins Institution in Boston, where a teacher was found for Keller, though she did not arrive until the following March.

On March 3, 1887—a date which Keller says is the most important of her life—Anne Mansfield Sullivan came to Tuscumbia to teach her. Keller recalls that she had guessed “from the hurrying to and fro in the house that something unusual was about to happen.” She was standing on the porch when, she says,

I felt approaching footsteps, I stretched out my hand as I supposed to my mother. Some one took it, and I was caught up and held close in the arms of her who had come to reveal all things to me, and, more than all things else, to love me.

The morning after her arrival, Sullivan gave Keller a doll. She then spelled out the word “d-o-l-l” into Keller’s hand. The child was immediately interested and tried to imitate the formation of the letters with her fingers. Although she did not know what she was doing, or even that words existed, she learned to spell out many words in the ensuing weeks. A great breakthrough occurred one day when Sullivan was teaching Keller the words “mug” and “water.” Keller...