Daniel Keyes, whose fascination with the workings of the mind drove a writing career that produced the classic 1966 novel "Flowers for Algernon," died Sunday at his South Florida home from complications of pneumonia, his family said. He was 86.
"Flowers for Algernon," which Keyes initially wrote as a short story, goes inside the head of Charlie Gordon, a man with an IQ of 68 who is painfully aware of his mental limits and yearns to be smart.
The novel takes the form of Charlie's journal entries or "progris riports," which are filled with his spelling and grammatical mistakes until he undergoes an operation that enhances his intelligence, much as it had with Algernon, the lab mouse that had the surgery first. But when Algernon regresses, Charlie realizes that the same fate awaits him.
"I was deeply moved and always in awe of the way Keyes used subtle changes in voice to illustrate the mutating nature of Charlie's intelligence," Steven Gould, president of the
Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, said this week. "Today I'm finding it incredibly poignant that Charlie's last expressed wish in both the short story and the novel is that someone put flowers on Algernon's grave."
"Flowers for Algernon" brought Keyes some of the highest honors in science fiction: the Hugo Award for the 1959 short story and the Nebula Award for the novel. It also inspired numerous adaptations, including a 1980 Broadway musical and a 2000
TV movie starring Matthew Modine. The most famous adaptation, however, was the 1968 movie "Charly," which starred
Cliff Robertson in an Academy Award-winning performance.
