Flowers For Algernon, The play of Daniel Keyes

ISBN: 9780435232931

The Heinemann Plays series offers contemporary drama and classic plays in durable classroom editions. Many have large casts and an equal mix of boy and girl parts. This play is a dramatization of Daniel Keyes's story about a retarded adult who desperately wants to be able to read and write.

Daniel Keyes was born in New York. At seventeen, after a year at New York University, he joined the US Maritime Service and went to sea as a ship's purser on oil tankers carrying cargo between the US and Europe and the Middle East.  When Daniel Keyes left the sea he resumed his studies at Brooklyn College (now Cuny) where he received his BA degree in psychology in 1950. The following month he was employed as associate fiction editor by Magazine Management in New York. Here Keyes began to learn the craft of writing. He left editing to enter the fashion photography business, and then, after earning a licence to teach English in the New York City schools, he came full circle to teach at the high school from which he'd graduated ten years earlier.
While teaching days and writing weekends, Keyes returned to Brooklyn College at night for post-graduate study in English and American Literature. During this time, in 1959, his short story, Flowers for Algernon was published and won the Hugo Award. In 1961, after receiving his MA degree, Keyes left New York to teach Creative Writing at Wayne State University (1962-66). From
1962-66 he worked on the novel length version of Flowers for Algernon.