Page 126 - The Story of My Lif

words her own.

So these selections from Miss Keller’s correspondence are made with two
purposes—to show her development and to preserve the most entertaining and
significant passages from several hundred letters. Many of those written before
1892 were published in the reports of the Perkins Institution for the Blind. All
letters up to that year are printed intact, for it is legitimate to be interested in the

degree of skill the child showed in writing, even to details of punctuation; so it is
well to preserve a literal integrity of reproduction. From the letters after the year
1892 I have culled in the spirit of one making an anthology, choosing the
passages best in style and most important from the point of view of biography.
Where I have been able to collate the original letters I have preserved everything
as Miss Keller wrote it, punctuation, spelling, and all. I have done nothing but
select and cut.

The letters are arranged in chronological order. One or two letters from Bishop
Brooks, Dr. Holmes, and Whittier are put immediately after the letters to which
they are replies. Except for two or three important letters of 1901, these
selections cease with the year 1900. In that year Miss Keller entered college.
Now that she is a grown woman, her mature letters should be judged like those
of any other person, and it seems best that no more of her correspondence be
published unless she should become distinguished beyond the fact that she is the
only well-educated deaf and blind person in the world.

LETTERS (1887-1901)

Miss Sullivan began to teach Helen Keller on March 3rd, 1887.

Three months and a half after the first word was spelled into her hand, she wrote
in pencil this letter TO HER COUSIN ANNA, MRS. GEORGE T. TURNER

[Tuscumbia, Alabama, June 17, 1887.]