Flowers for Algernon
Flowers for Algernon
His spelling improves with each entry. Then you notice it getting worse again. One of the most quietly devastating arcs in all of fiction.
Progress Report
Daniel Keyes's 1966 novel is narrated entirely through the progress reports of Charlie Gordon, a 37-year-old bakery worker with an IQ of 68 who undergoes experimental brain surgery that rapidly transforms him into a genius. As his intelligence soars he begins to see the world, and the people in it, with a painful clarity. Algernon is the mouse who underwent the surgery first. When Algernon begins to decline, Charlie understands what is coming for him too. The novel won the Nebula Award and began as a short story that won the Hugo Award in 1960.
Reading Flowers for Algernon
Feeling
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Progress Report
"I'm living at a peak of clarity and beauty I never knew existed.
"Daniel Keyes · Flowers for Algernon
Keyes spent eight years trying to get the short story published, facing rejection after rejection. It was finally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1959 and won the Hugo Award the following year.
Keyes was inspired by a student who asked him whether it would be possible to become smart if you really wanted to. He spent years thinking about what it would mean to have intelligence surgically installed and then lose it.