Flowers for Algernon
Author: Daniel Keyes
Type: Short Story
Genre: Short Story (Sci-Fi)
Reading Month: September 2026
Charlie Gordon is thirty-seven, works as a janitor at a plastic box factory, and attends a night class for adults who are learning to read. When two researchers offer him a place in an experimental procedure meant to raise his intelligence, he says yes — and agrees to keep a written record of everything that happens to him.
That record is the story. Told entirely through Charlie’s own progress reports, Keyes’s Hugo Award-winning novella lets us watch the world change shape around a narrator whose way of describing it changes too. It’s a short read that raises large questions: what intelligence is actually worth, how much of kindness is condescension, and whether the people who laugh with us are laughing with us at all.
