Context
Daniel Keyes was born in 1927 in
Brooklyn, New York. After working as a merchant seaman, he attended Brooklyn
College, where he earned both bachelor's and master's degrees. He
went on to become a fiction editor at Marvel Science Fiction and
also worked as a high school teacher for developmentally disabled
adults. Having periodically published science-fiction stories since
the early 1950s, Keyes drew
on his experience in the classroom and his love of science fiction
to compose a short story called “Flowers for Algernon” in 1959.
The story, about a mentally retarded man whose IQ is
tripled as the result of an experimental operation, was widely acclaimed
and enormously popular. The story received one of science fiction's
highest honors, the Hugo Award, for best story of the year in 1959.
In 1961, a successful
television adaptation, The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon, starred
Cliff Robertson as Charlie. Still interested in the character of
Charlie and the ideas contained in the short story, Keyes set out
to enlarge “Flowers for Algernon” into a full-length novel. The
result, published in 1966,
won the Nebula Award—-science fiction's other highest honor—for
best novel of the year and expanded dramatically on the popularity
of the short story. In 1968, the
novel version was adapted again, this time for a feature film called Charly. Cliff
Robertson reprised his role as Charlie Gordon and won an Academy
Award for his performance. The story has since been adapted many
times in many media, notably in 1978 as
a short-lived Broadway musical, Charlie and Algernon, and
as a television drama in 2000 starring
Matthew Modine.
The novel version of Flowers for Algernon was
the high point of Daniel Keyes's career, and it remains by far his
most popular and most acclaimed work, having been consistently in
print for nearly forty years. Keyes has not been a prolific author;
since his success with Flowers for Algernon, he
has written only three more novels and three works of journalism
exploring true crime cases. Like Flowers for Algernon, both
his fiction and nonfiction are primarily focused on the extraordinary
complexities of the human mind. One book of journalism, The
Minds of Billy Milligan, tells the true story of a convicted
murderer with multiple personality disorder who claimed to embody
twenty-four different personae. In 2000,
Keyes published a book called Algernon, Charlie, and I:
A Writer's Journey, chronicling his relationship with his
most famous story, from his first inspiration to write it to his
reflections on its continuing success decades later.
The widespread and enduring interest in Flowers
for Algernon is a testament to the depth and originality
of its premise. Many people wonder how their lives would be affected
by becoming more, or less, intelligent, and Keyes gives us a glimpse
into what such a journey might be like. Though Keyes's background
is in science fiction and the novel undoubtedly belongs to that
genre, it also transcends the limitations of the genre. Whereas
many -science-fiction writers alienate mainstream readers by focusing
on technology and the inhuman aspects of the worlds they create,
Keyes uses science fiction as a springboard for an exploration of
universal human themes such as the nature of intellect, the nature
of emotion, and how the two interact.
Though Flowers for Algernon depends on
science fiction to drive its plot—no intelligence-enhancing surgery
has yet been attempted or realized—its characters and situations
are quite ordinary. The characters are New York City scientists,
teachers, bakers, and barbers, not the space rangers and galactic
swashbucklers often associated with science fiction. Indeed, Keyes
utilizes science fiction's potential for philosophical inquiry and
its capacity to explore the extremes of human nature by imagining
an altered version of the world. However, he combines these aspects
of science fiction with realistic characters in a realistic environment,
creating a work that has enthralled both people who are indifferent
to science fiction and avid fans of the genre.
