Flowers for Algernon
by Daniel Keyes
Summary
Charlie Gordon is thirty two, has an IQ of sixty eight, works at a bakery sweeping floors, and attends a night class for adults with learning disabilities because he wants more than anything to be smart. He is selected for an experimental surgery that has already worked on a laboratory mouse called Algernon.
The novel is his progress reports, and the spelling is the structure. They begin misspelled, unpunctuated and painfully willing. Over weeks they sharpen, then become fluent, then become technical, then become arrogant, until Charlie is outthinking and correcting the scientists who operated on him.
What he acquires along the way is not happiness. He works out that his colleagues at the bakery were laughing at him rather than with him, that the woman who taught his night class was kind and that he now finds her unimpressive, and that his mother beat him for being what he was. Intelligence gives him access to memories he could not previously understand.
Then Algernon begins to deteriorate, and Charlie, who is now the only person qualified to analyse the data, calculates exactly what is going to happen to him and how long he has.
The final reports are the most devastating pages in science fiction, and the spelling tells you before the content does.
Around three hundred pages, plain, quick and almost unbearable. Best for readers who want one of the few genre novels that has fully entered general literature, and who can take an ending everyone can see coming.
Historical Context & Significance
Flowers for Algernon shared the 1966 Nebula Award for Best Novel with Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17. The 1959 novelette it grew from had already won the Hugo for Best Short Fiction in 1960, which makes it one of very few works honoured in both forms.
Five publishers rejected the expanded novel before Harcourt bought it, objecting above all to the ending. Daniel Keyes refused to change it.
Keyes taught in a special education classroom and worked as a fiction editor, and has said the story began with a student who asked to be moved to a regular class so he could get smart.
It became the film Charly in 1968, winning Cliff Robertson the Academy Award for Best Actor, and has been staged, filmed and adapted for radio repeatedly since. It is also among the most frequently challenged books in American schools.