Helen Keller may be the most famous supercrip in the world. Very few people can claim to have "overcome" disability so completely and spectacularly. A wild child who was blind and deaf at age 7, she became, when she published The Story of My Life at 22, one of Radcliffe's finest and most successful students, fluent in Latin, Greek, German, French and (not least ) English, not to mention the three versions of Braille (English, American, New York Point) and the manual alphabet with which her famous teacher Anne Sullivan first communicated with her. But let me give up on the scary quotes for a moment. Helen Keller is famous – and rightly so – precisely because she managed, in many ways, to overcome the physical impairments associated with deafness and blindness, as well as the formidable social obstacles that people with disabilities faced in the late nineteenth century. Her story retains its power to surprise and inspire even now, just as Anne Sullivan's story remains among the most surprising and inspiring tales in the history of pedagogy. Keller's story is also part of the genre of disability autobiographies in which the writing of one's life takes on the characteristics of what philosopher J. L. Austin called "performative" statements: The primary function of The Story of My Life, in this sense, is to let readers know that its author is capable of telling the story of her life. The point is not trivial at all. Helen Keller was dogged almost all her life by the accusation that she was little more than a ventriloquist's dummy: a mouthpiece for Anne Sullivan, or, later, for the original editor of The Story of My Life, the socialist literary critic John Macy. who married Sullivan in 1905. And even for those who cannot see Helen Keller as the Charlie McCarthy of disability, her education and surprising facility with languages ​​nevertheless raise troubling and fascinating questions about subjectivity, individuality, and language. Roger Shattuck and Dorothy Herrmann's new edition of The Story of My Life - supplemented as it is with Anne Sullivan's short story, John Macy's accounts of the book and Keller's life, Keller's letters, and Shattuck's afterword - not only restores Keller's original text but highlights questions about originality and texts—questions that defined Keller's relationship with language from the age of 12, when he published a short story titled "The Frost King." The episode is largely forgotten now, but in 1892 it was a national topic.