Daniel Keyes

Daniel Keyes was born in Brooklyn in 1927 to a Jewish family. At 17 he joined the United States Maritime Service and worked as a ship's purser on oil tankers. He then earned a degree in psychology at Brooklyn College in 1950.

He worked as an editor of pulp magazines and of comics at Atlas, the company that became Marvel, under Stan Lee. Later he taught high school English, and one of his students with an intellectual disability gave him an idea: what if surgery could make a person a genius, and then the effect wore off? The short story Flowers for Algernon appeared in 1959 and won a Hugo Award. The 1966 novel won a Nebula Award and became the movie Charly (1968). It is written as the progress reports of Charlie Gordon, and his spelling and thought change as his intelligence rises and falls.

Keyes taught creative writing at Ohio University for many years. His nonfiction book The Minds of Billy Milligan (1981) tells the story of a man found not guilty of serious crimes by reason of insanity after doctors diagnosed multiple personality disorder. Keyes died in Boca Raton, Florida, in 2014.