Today we celebrate the birth of Helen Keller. Many of us are familiar with the basics of Keller’s biography—that childhood illness left her deaf and blind, that she worked with her teacher Anne Sullivan to acquire language—but she was also a prolific writer and a tireless activist, lending her support to the advancement of women and various socialist causes. Her intellectually daring memoir, The World I Live In, is available from NYRB Classics.
“While Helen Keller is better known for The Story of My Life, her later book, The World I Live In, is a warmer, more intimate and more beautiful work, one in which we encounter Helen Keller’s remarkable imagination, her originality, and her power as a literary artist. She comes alive here, vividly and idiosyncratically, more than in any other of her writings.”
—Oliver Sacks