A few weeks after graduating from Brooklyn College with a bachelor's degree in psychology, Daniel Keyes took a job with Magazine Management, a pulp periodical outfit run by Martin Goodman—best known as the founder of Marvel Comics. Most of Keyes early efforts at storytelling came via his work for various comic books, back before the field got rebranded as graphic novels and gained a patina of respectability.
In the early 1950s, Keyes learned the trade under the guidance of Stan Lee, perhaps the greatest visionary in the comic book field. Lee, he later recalled, was "a lanky, shy young man who kept pretty much to himself." But Lee read the plot outlines submitted by his staff writers, and would decide which ideas warranted development into a script, with dialogue and panel-by-panel exposition.
At this stage in his career, Keyes was specializing in science fiction, fantasy and horror stories for Atlas Comics, a precursor of Marvel. During this period, Keyes came up with an unconventional story idea, which he sketched out in a single-paragrph synopsis:
The first guy in the test to raise the I.Q. from a low normal 90 to genius level…He goes through the experience, and then is thrown back to what he was…he is no brighter than he was before, but having had a sample of light, he can never be the same. The pathos of a man who knows what it is to be brilliant and to know that he can never again have the things he tasted for the first time, including a brilliant, beautiful woman he fill in love with and with he whom he can no longer have any contact.
Keyes knew that this plot had potential, but he finally decided not to share it with his boss. "I didn’t submit it to Stan Lee because something told me it should be more than a comic book script. I knew I would do it someday after I learned how to write." That was probably the correct decision, but just imagine if Keyes had gone the Marvel comic book route, and now had his story getting the merchandising push enjoyed by Spider Man, Captain America and The Fantastic Four? Maybe we’d have a new Charlie Gordon blockbuster film every summer? Okay, maybe not….
Keyes continued to refine the story idea over the next few years, considering different protagonists—maybe an ex-con, or perhaps a working class plumber's assistant, or a lovelorn bachelor. Finally in 1957, while teaching English to students with learning disabilities, Keyes was struck by the efforts of the more ambitious to surmount their handicaps and develop their skills. By the time he started work in earnest on "Flowers for Algernon," he had a clear vision of his hero, a janitor named Charlie Gordon, with an I.Q. of 68—chosen as a test subject for a new surgical procedure that enhances intelligence. The treatment had already proven its efficacy with a mouse, named Algernon, and now Gordon would be the first human to undergo it.
Keyes approached Galaxy magazine with the finished story, but editor Herbert Gold wanted a more upbeat ending. Keyes refused and instead sold "Flowers for Algernon" to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction , where it appeared in the April 1959 issue.
This short story had an amazing after-life. Keyes earned a Hugo award (for best short story) the following year. In 1961, the story was turned into a television broadcast, "The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon." In 1966, Keyes published a longer, novel-sized version of Flowers for Algernon , and it won the Nebula in 1967. In 1968, the novel got turned into the Hollywood movie Charly , starring Cliff Robertson, and was the 16th highest-grossing film of the year. The novel would eventually get translated into 27 languages and sell some 5 million copies. For many years, Keyes' novel was frequently assigned as required reading in high school and college classrooms.
Keyes deserved every bit of this success. There are many things to admire in Flowers for Algernon . Let's start with the plot itself, which set off a whole series of later sci-fi stories about intelligence enhancement—see, for example, "Understand" by Ted Chiang and Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch. In the sci-fi field, new story types are rarer than black holes, with the vast majority of tales falling into well-known categories (space opera, time travel, first contact with aliens, genetic experiments gone bad, etc. etc.) that are worked and over-worked. Keyes invented a new one, and earns our admiration for his creativity and boldness.
But Keyes achieved an even more significant breakthrough with Flowers for Algernon . He showed that science fiction could be character-driven, and that even genre readers would respond to a story that focused on the pathos of the protagonist, and the psychological underpinnings of the narrative. This is real boldness, and Keyes' breakthrough is all the more stunning when one considers that the clever technology angle in his story would have been sufficient, given the expectations of the pulp fiction market of his day, to make a sale and please the sci-fi audience. Keyes wisely understood that the hook in his story wasn't the science, but the personal tragedy of Charlie Gordon. Even today, more than a half-century after "Flowers for Algernon" first appeared in print, it still strikes us as fresh and forward-looking. And for a very good reason: few science fiction authors have learned its lessons. Character-driven sci-fi is still a great rarity.
Keyes' decision to present his story in the form of a first-person journal was critical to the work’s impact and longevity. But this choice also posed challenges. Keyes had to change his prose style every few paragraphs to match the changing mental horizons of his narrator. Here, for example, is the opening passage of Flowers for Algernon :
progris riport 1 march 3
Dr Strauss says I shoud rite down what I think and remembir and evrey thing that happins to me from now on. I dont no why but he says its importint so they will see if they can use me. I hope they use me becaus Miss Kinnian says mabye they can make me smart. I want to be smart….
But 80 pages later, we encounter:
I told Strauss that I was too involved in thinking, reading, and digging into myself, trying to understand who and what I am, and that writing was such a slow process it made me impatient to get my ideas down. I followed his suggestion that I learn to type, and now that I can type nearly seventy-five words a minute, it's easier to get it all down on paper. Strauss again brought up my need to speak and write simply and directly so that people will understand me. He reminds me that language is sometimes a barrier instead of a pathway. Ironic to find myself on the other side of the intellectual fence….
Make no mistake, this author may have started out working within the constraints of comic books, but by this point in his development as a writer he had grasped the nuances of the best literary fiction. Because he never matched the success of this early work with his later books, many consider Daniel Keyes a one-hit-wonder, a pulp fiction writer who had perhaps a lucky break with his one big seller. But, as Keyes demonstrates on page after page in this work, luck had nothing to do with it.
Yet there’s sad irony in the fact that Keyes' own career followed the arc of his most famous protagonist. He rose from the least respectable form of commercial narrative, the comic book, and climbed the heights of literary fiction, but couldn't sustain it. By the end of his life he had returned to writing pulp fiction thrillers, and probably wondering, much as did Charlie Gordon, at the strange reversals of his career.
One final note: I would suggest that readers go back to the original short story, and start with its pristine vision of Charlie Gordon, and only then move on to the novel and film. The book-long treatment is a powerful work, but I still prefer the original magazine tale. It ranks among the best shorter works of mid-20th century American fiction, and its virtues should not be obscured by the subsequent success of the novel and film.
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. His next book, a history of love songs, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Daniel Keyes' career followed the arc of his most famous protagonist. He rose from the least respectable form of commercial narrative, the comic book, and climbed the heights of literary fiction ...yet couldn't sustain it.