Daniel Keyes
1 book analyzed
Biography
Daniel Keyes (1927-2014) was a Brooklyn-born writer who worked as a magazine editor, fiction editor, and English teacher before and during his writing career. Most crucially, he taught English to students with intellectual disabilities in Brooklyn before and during the writing of the original short story. His direct experience with intellectually disabled students gave him access to the emotional and social reality of Charlie Gordon's world — the stigma, the earnestness, the capacity for joy and connection that existed entirely independent of IQ. The short story 'Flowers for Algernon' was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1959, won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1960, and Keyes spent the next six years expanding it into the 1966 novel, which won the Nebula Award. The expansion allowed him to develop what the short story could only sketch: the sustained diction experiment, the family backstory, and the full ethical argument about intelligence as a social value.