书名：The Story of My Life  我的人生故事/我的生活
难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数1090L
作者：Helen Keller海伦·凯勒
出版社名称：Signet Classics
出版时间：2010
语种：英文 
ISBN：9780451531568
商品尺寸：10.6 x1.8 x 17.3 cm
包装：简装
页数：256 （以实物为准）

The Story of My Life《我的人生故事》（《我的生活》），美国著名盲人作家海伦·凯勒处女作，作品一发表，立即在美国引起了轰动，被誉为“世界文学史上无与伦比的杰作”。本书适合各位海伦·凯勒的书迷们或英语学习者阅读。
推荐理由：
1.海伦·凯勒自传作品，展现了其乐观自强的精神，美国中小学必读励志书籍；
2.原汁原味的美式英语，有利于提高阅读水平；
3.书中收录了很多信件，是非常好的书信范文。

本书为Signet Classics推出的英文原版，由Jim Knipfel 作序，Marlee Matlin写后记，内容完整无删减，书本小巧便携。

Helen Keller’s triumph over her blindness and deafness has become one of the most inspiring stories of our time. Here, in a book first published when she was young woman, is Helen Keller’s own story—complex, poignant, and filled with love.

With unforgettable immediacy, Helen’s own words reveal the heart of an exceptional woman, her struggles and joys, including that memorable moment when she finally understands that Anne’s finger-spelled letters w-a-t-e-r mean the fluid rushing over her hand. Helen Keller was always a compassionate and witty advocate for the handicapped, and her sincere and eloquent memoir is deeply moving for the sighted and the blind, the deaf and the hearing. “Her spirit will endure,” said Senator Lister Hill at her funeral, “as long as man can read and stories can be told of the woman who showed the world there are no boundaries to courage and faith.” Through movies and plays, most notably The Miracle Worker, which portrayed her relationship with her teacher, Anne Sullivan, Keller’s life has become an emblem of hope for people everywhere.
 
With an Introduction by Jim Knipfel
and an Afterword by Marlee Matlin

This Signet Classic edition includes a facsimile of the Braille alphabet, a sign-language alphabet, and a full selection of Helen Keller’s letters.

Review
“The greatest woman of our age.”  —Winston Churchill

“Helen Keller is fellow to Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Homer, Shakespeare, and the rest of the immortals... She will be as famous a thousand years from now as she is today.”  —Mark Twain

The Story of My Life《我的人生故事》（也译作《我的生活》）是一部自传体的著作，主要分为两部分。前半部分主要讲述了海伦·凯勒因一场疾病失去了视觉、听觉，但在安妮·沙利文老师的耐心教育下学会读书认字、认识世界，并以优秀成绩从哈佛大学毕业，之后成长为著名教育家及作家的故事，传递乐观、自强的海伦精神。后半部分收录了其1887-1901年间的书信集，展示了海伦·凯勒在思想和表达方面的成长过程。
Helen Keller’ triumph over her blindness and deafness has become one of the most inspiring stories of our time. Here, in a book first published when she was young woman, is Helen Keller’s own story- complex, poignant, and filled with love.

海伦·凯勒（Helen Keller 1880-1968），美国作家、教育家、慈善家、社会活动家。1880年6月27日，出生在美国阿拉巴马州塔斯坎比亚；19个月大时因猩红热失去视力和听力；7岁，开始跟随安妮·莎莉文老师学习；1900年秋，考入哈佛大学拉德克利夫女子学院；1904年6月，以优等成绩从哈佛大学毕业，掌握英语、法语、德语、拉丁语和希腊语五种语言，是首位获得文学学士学位的盲聋人；1964年，被授予美国公民高荣誉——总统自由勋章；1965年，入选美国《时代周刊》“二十世纪美国十大英雄偶像”；1968年6月1日，与世长辞，享年87岁。一生共著有14部作品，代表作品：《我生命的故事》《我的人生秘诀：乐观》《假如给我三天光明》《我的老师》《石墙之歌》。

Helen Adams Keller (1880-1968) was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama in 1880. As a result of an illness, she became deaf and blind at the age of nineteen months. In 1887, her learning began with her teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, and at the age of nineteen, she entered Radcliffe College, from which she graduated in 1904. A well-known lecturer and writer, she published her autobiography, The Story of My Life, in 1902. Her other works include Optimism (1903), The World I Live In (1908), and The Song of the Stone Wall (1910). 
 
Marlee Matlin received worldwide critical acclaim for her film “Children of a Lesser God,” for which she received the Academy Award for Best Actress, becoming the youngest recipient of the Best Actress Oscar and only one of four actresses to receive the honor for her film debut.  Since then she has gone on to star in numerous film and television roles. In 1994, she was appointed by President Clinton to the Corporation for National Service and she currently serves as spokesperson for The American Red Cross as well as on the boards of a number of charitable organizations, continuing to advocate on behalf of children and people with disabilities. She has authored three novels for children, Deaf Child Crossing, Nobody’s Perfect and Leading Ladies and in 2009, published her New York Times bestselling autobiography I’ll Scream Later.
 
Jim Knipfel is a staff writer at New York Press, as well as the author of Slackjaw and Quitting the Nairobi Trio.

Chapter I

It is with a kind of fear that I begin to write the history of my life. I have, as it were, a superstitious hesitation in lifting the veil that clings about my childhood like a golden mist. The task of writing an autobiography is a difficult one. When I try to classify my earliest impressions, I find that fact and fancy look alike across the years that link the past with the present. The woman paints the child’s experiences in her own fantasy. A few impressions stand out vividly from the first years of my life; but “the shadows of the prison-house are on the rest.” Besides, many of the joys and sorrows of childhood have lost their poignancy; and many incidents of vital importance in my early education have been forgotten in the excitement of great discoveries. In order, therefore, not to be tedious I shall try to present in a series of sketches only the episodes that seem to me to be the most interesting and important.

I was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, a little town of northern Alabama.

The family on my father’s side is descended from Caspar Keller, a native of Switzerland, who settled in Maryland. One of my Swiss ancestors was the first teacher of the deaf in Zurich and wrote a book on the subject of their education-rather a singular coincidence; though it is true that there is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

My grandfather, Caspar Keller’s son, “entered” large tracts of land in Alabama and finally settled there. I have been told that once a year he went from Tuscumbia to Philadelphia on horseback to purchase supplies for the plantation, and my aunt has in her possession many of the letters to his family, which give charming and vivid accounts of these trips.

My Grandmother Keller was a daughter of one of Lafayette’s aides, Alexander Moore, and granddaughter of Alexander Spotswood, an early Colonial Governor of Virginia. She was also second cousin to Robert E. Lee.

My father, Arthur H. Keller, was a captain in the Confederate Army, and my mother, Kate Adams, was his second wife and many years younger. Her grandfather, Benjamin Adams, married Susanna E. Goodhue, and lived in Newbury, Massachusetts, for many years. Their son, Charles Adams, was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and moved to Helena, Arkansas. When the Civil War broke out, he fought on the side of the South and became a brigadier-general. He married Lucy Helen Everett, who belonged to the same family of Everetts as Edward Everett and Dr. Edward Everett Hale. After the war was over the family moved to Memphis, Tennessee.

I lived, up to the time of the illness that deprived me of my sight and hearing, in a tiny house consisting of a large square room and a small one, in which the servant slept. It is a custom in the South to build a small house near the homestead as an annex to be used on occasion. Such a house my father built after the Civil War, and when he married my mother they went to live in it. It was completely covered with vines, climbing roses and honeysuckles. From the garden it looked like an arbour. The little porch was hidden from view by a screen of yellow roses and Southern smilax. It was the favourite haunt of humming-birds and bees.

The Keller homestead, where the family lived, was a few steps from our little rose-bower. It was called “Ivy Green” because the house and the surrounding trees and fences were covered with beautiful English ivy. Its old-fashioned garden was the paradise of my childhood.

Even in the days before my teacher came, I used to feel along the square stiff boxwood hedges, and, guided by the sense of smell, would find the first violets and lilies. There, too, after a fit of temper, I went to find comfort and to hide my hot face in the cool leaves and grass. What joy it was to lose myself in that garden of flowers, to wander happily from spot to spot, until, coming suddenly upon a beautiful vine, I recognized it by its leaves and blossoms, and knew it was the vine which covered the tumble-down summer-house at the farther end of the garden! Here, also, were trailing clematis, drooping jessamine, and some rare sweet flowers called butterfly lilies, because their fragile petals resemble butterflies’ wings. But the roses-they were loveliest of all. Never have I found in the greenhouses of the North such heart-satisfying roses as the climbing roses of my southern home. They used to hang in long festoons from our porch, filling the whole air with their fragrance, untainted by any earthy smell; and in the early morning, washed in the dew, they felt so soft, so pure, I could not help wondering if they did not resemble the asphodels of God’s garden.