About the Author

Daniel Keyes was born in Brooklyn in 1927 and spent most of his twenties trying on lives that never quite fit. He studied psychology at Brooklyn College, shipped out briefly as a ship's purser in the U.S. Maritime Service, and then edited pulp magazines in Manhattan, including Marvel Science Stories and the stable of titles at Martin Goodman's Atlas Comics, the company that would later become Marvel. In 1957 he took a job teaching English to students in a special-education class at a Brooklyn high school, and the question one of those students asked him, about whether, if he worked hard, he could be made "smart," is the seed from which Flowers for Algernon grew. Keyes later taught creative writing at Wayne State University and finished his career as a professor of English at Ohio University, where he remained until his death in 2014.

Detailed Analysis

Every major element of the novel maps onto something Keyes had actually lived. The psychoanalytic vocabulary that floods Charlie's middle reports comes from Keyes's own undergraduate training in psychology. The editorial eye that lets Charlie catch Nemur's statistical errors in Chicago comes from years of slush-pile reading at Marvel Science Stories. The classroom at the "Beekman College Center for Retarded Adults," where Alice Kinnian teaches night students, is a thinly fictionalized version of the Brooklyn high-school program Keyes taught in. His later work makes the continuity even clearer. The Minds of Billy Milligan (1981), a nonfiction account of a man diagnosed with what was then called multiple personality disorder, is recognizably the same project as Algernon by different means: Keyes taking a first-person voice that American fiction had historically refused to grant, and insisting that the interior life inside it is as dense and particular as anyone else's. Within the science-fiction tradition, Keyes belongs with the postwar writers, Theodore Sturgeon, Alfred Bester, Judith Merril, who were dragging the genre away from space-opera adventure and toward psychology, and he is one of the few writers of that cohort whose single best book has survived intact outside the SF shelves.

Historical Background

Keyes first published "Flowers for Algernon" as a short story in the April 1959 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It won the 1960 Hugo Award for Best Short Fiction and was adapted in 1961 as a live television drama called "The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon" on The United States Steel Hour, with Cliff Robertson in the title role. Robertson liked the part so much he bought the film rights himself, and it was his persistence that drove Keyes to expand the story into the 1966 novel, which shared that year's Nebula Award for Best Novel with Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17. Robertson then produced and starred in the 1968 film adaptation, Charly, which won him the Academy Award for Best Actor. No other work of postwar American science fiction has moved through that many forms, short story, teleplay, novel, film, and kept its center intact.

Detailed Analysis

The novel landed in the middle of a specific American argument about what the country owed its cognitively disabled citizens. In 1961, President Kennedy, whose sister Rosemary had been lobotomized at twenty-three and institutionalized for the rest of her life, convened the President's Panel on Mental Retardation, using the clinical term standard at the time. The panel's 1962 report was blistering about the conditions in state institutions, and its recommendations helped launch what became the deinstitutionalization movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. The fictional Warren State Home, where Charlie visits the children in the cottages and eventually commits himself, is the kind of facility that panel was investigating. Keyes's depiction, sympathetic to the staff but unsparing about the warehousing, reads as a piece of that moment's documentary record, and it is one of the reasons the novel still turns up on reading lists in disability studies alongside more recent work. The broader civil-rights context matters too. A book published in 1966 that insists a man with an IQ of 68 has an interior life equal to his surgeons was making a claim that ran parallel to, and borrowed some of its moral energy from, the expansion of personhood happening elsewhere in American public life.

Its literary lineage is older and stranger than its science-fiction packaging suggests. The premise, a scientist whose experiment gives a creature more than it can carry, runs straight back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and H.G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau, and Keyes signals the connection openly with his Plato epigraph about the man who escapes the cave and is blinded by the sun. The form is even more unusual. The progress-report device belongs to the epistolary tradition of Richardson and Stoker, novels told entirely through documents the characters themselves produce, which is why the reader feels the rise and fall of Charlie's intelligence as something happening to the prose rather than described by it. Freud was also ambient in 1960s middle-class American life in a way that is hard to recover now, and Strauss's therapy sessions, Charlie's recovered memories of Rose and Norma, and the entire construction of Charlie's erotic paralysis with Alice are all legible as psychoanalytic set-pieces of their period. Fay Lillman, the bohemian painter across the hall, is the era's other cliché, the sexually liberated Village artist, and Keyes uses her deliberately as a foil to the repressed world Charlie came from.

Reception has been complicated. Critics in 1966 recognized the novel as a breakthrough for science fiction as a literary form; the Nebula win alongside Delany confirmed that the field took it seriously. In schools, it has been one of the most frequently challenged books on American reading lists for half a century, usually over the sex scenes with Fay and Alice and, more recently, over the now-outdated clinical vocabulary Charlie and his doctors use. Both objections miss the point the book is making. The vocabulary is period-accurate because it is Charlie's; the sex is on the page because the novel is arguing that a full adult life includes a body. What has held up best is the thing the early reviewers saw first: the progress-report form, and the way it forces the reader to grieve a mind in real time, sentence by sentence, down to a last postscript about flowers on a mouse's grave.