Flowers for Algernon

Flowers for Algernon is a science fiction novel by the American writer Daniel Keyes, published in 1966 as an expansion of his 1959 short story of the same name. Told through a series of first-person progress reports written by its narrator, Charlie Gordon, a thirty-two-year-old man with an intellectual disability working as a janitor at a bakery, the novel follows Charlie after he is selected as the first human subject for an experimental surgical procedure designed to dramatically increase intelligence, a procedure already tested successfully on a laboratory mouse named Algernon. As the surgery takes effect, Charlie's progress reports, initially written in simple, error-filled prose, grow increasingly sophisticated as his intelligence rises far beyond genius level, allowing him to surpass even the scientists who created him, though his heightened intellect also brings painful new awareness of how the people around him, including coworkers he had once considered friends, had long mocked and exploited his disability, and strains his budding relationship with his former teacher, Alice Kinnian. When Algernon's own enhanced intelligence begins to deteriorate and the mouse eventually dies, Charlie realizes with mounting dread, expressed in his own reports as his prose gradually simplifies again, that the effect is temporary and that he is doomed to regress back to his original intellectual disability, a decline the novel's final entries chart with a poignancy that made the story one of the most acclaimed treatments in science fiction of intelligence, dignity and the ethics of experimenting on vulnerable human subjects. The original short story won the 1960 Hugo Award and the novel went on to win the 1966 Nebula Award for best novel, and Charlie's final request, asking that someone please put flowers on Algernon's grave in the yard, remains one of the most quoted closing lines in science fiction.