Flowers for Algernon

Flowers for Algernon, award-winning short story by American author Daniel Keyes that was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in April 1959. The short story was expanded into a novel in 1966. A science fiction exploration of topics such as human intelligence, intellectual disabilities, and romance, the novel is written exclusively as a series of diary entries from the protagonist, an intellectually disabled man named Charlie Gordon.

Summary

“Flowers for Algernon” tells the story of Charlie Gordon, an intellectually disabled man in his mid-30s. Charlie, a factory employee (in the novel he works at a bakery) and a student at the Beekman Center for Retarded Adults, is chosen to undergo an experiment that would dramatically increase his IQ of 68. Although Charlie is the first human patient to undergo the procedure, a laboratory mouse named Algernon had previously undergone the procedure successfully. To test his progress, Charlie competes with Algernon to solve various mazes.

Charlie dutifully journals about his experiences before and after the procedure. His intelligence increases, as does his awareness of the world around him. Keyes emphasizes themes of identity, love, and the value of humanity. Charlie develops meaningful connections with the people in his life, especially Alice Kinnian, who had been his teacher at the Beekman Center and whom he falls in love with. Charlie is upset to discover that many of his former “friends” had been laughing at him before the experiment and learns harsh truths about how society treats those with intellectual disabilities. In the novel, Charlie is fired from his job, as his former coworkers and customers have come to fear him. The novel also includes insights about Charlie’s upbringing, his often caustic relationship with researchers Dr. Nemur and Dr. Strauss, and his exploration of his sexuality and desires.

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Charlie eventually comes to terms with how the world viewed him before the procedure and feels deep empathy for those with intellectual disabilities. As Charlie’s post-procedure genius exceeds the expectations of scientists, Algernon rapidly deteriorates until he eventually dies. Charlie faces the difficult realization that this may be his fate as well. Charlie develops a theory that he titles the “Algernon-Gordon Effect,” which explains that “artificially induced intelligence deteriorates at a rate of time directly proportional to the quantity of the increase.” At the end of the short story and the novel, Charlie lives in a facility for the intellectually disabled as the procedure’s effects have fully reversed.

About the author

Keyes was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1927. Although he grew up dreaming of becoming a writer, he instead entered New York University’s premedical program. After leaving college at just 17 to serve in the U.S. Maritime Service, he eventually enrolled in New York’s Brooklyn College, receiving a degree in psychology in 1950 and a master’s degree in English literature in 1961.

In a 1999 interview with the Japanese newspaper The Daily Yomiuri Keyes revealed that he developed the idea for a story about an experimental surgery to improve human intelligence after teaching English to students with intellectual disabilities. A student approached Keyes after class to be transferred out of the “dummy’s class” and into the “regular class” because he “wanted to be smart.” The idea stuck in Keyes’s mind, and he remembered an earlier thought he had had about the possibility of increasing human intelligence. The combination of ideas eventually led him to create “Flowers for Algernon.”

“Flowers for Algernon” won Keyes the Hugo Award for best short story in 1960. After the story was expanded into a novel, it tied for the Nebula Award for best novel of 1966 (along with the novel Babel-17, by Samuel Delany).

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Keyes’s other books include The Touch (1968), The Fifth Sally (1980), and The Minds of Billy Milligan (1981), which was based on a true story. He died of pneumonia complications in his home in South Florida in 2014 at age 86.

Reception

Flowers for Algernon is a common text in English classrooms across the United States and has sold more than five million copies. It has also appeared on the American Library Association’s most challenged books list of 1990–99 for its adult themes. Depictions of Charlie’s sexual expression and interactions with Alice Kinnian and his neighbor Fay led concerned parents to liken parts of the novel to pornography. Emporium, Pennsylvania, and Plant City, Florida, among other American cities, have banned Flowers for Algernon from their schools’ curricula at some point.

The feature film Charly (1968), based on the novel and starring Cliff Robertson and Claire Bloom, earned Robertson the 1969 Academy Award for best actor in the title role. Robertson had previously acted in the television drama series The United States Steel Hour in an episode titled “The Two Worlds of Charley Gordon” (1961), and he bought the rights to Charly because of his fascination with the story. Flowers for Algernon (2000) was a television movie adaptation of the story and starred Matthew Modine and Kelli Williams.