Literature
Daniel Keyes
1927–2014 · novelist, short-story writer, professor of creative writing
Author of Flowers for Algernon, he taught creative writing at Wayne State University in Detroit in the years before the novel version appeared in 1966.
- Born
Brooklyn, New York- Died
Boca Raton, Florida
aged 86- Detroit years
- early 1960s–1966
- Field
- Literature
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Keyes was a New Yorker who had worked as a ship's purser, a pulp-magazine editor and a high school English teacher before academic life brought him to Detroit. In the first half of the 1960s he taught creative writing at Wayne State University, the city's large public university in Midtown. His short story Flowers for Algernon, about a man whose intelligence is raised by an experimental operation, had already won a Hugo Award in 1960; the expanded novel came out in 1966, the year he left Wayne State for Ohio University. The book went on to win the Nebula Award, became a school-reading classic and was filmed as Charly (1968), which earned Cliff Robertson an Oscar.
Highlights
- Flowers for Algernon: Hugo Award (story, 1960) and Nebula Award (novel, 1966)
- Taught creative writing at Wayne State University before 1966
- The novel was adapted as the film Charly (1968)
- Author Emeritus honor from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (2000)
02 / Their Detroit places
Their Detroit places 1
Where they lived, worked, performed and liked to hang out. Closed and demolished places stay here too, because they are part of the city's history.
Worked here · early 1960s–1966
Wayne State University
Keyes taught creative writing at Wayne State before moving to Ohio University in 1966.