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"The challenge of first unearthing this story. Most of Keyes' subsequent novels and nonfiction work delved into mental illness, including "The Minds of Billy Milligan," a 1981 Book of the Month Club selection that was the true story of an Ohio rapist who was found not guilty by reason of insanity after a precedent-setting defense that established that he had multiple personality disorder. The most famous adaptation, however, was the 1968 movie "Charly," which starred Cliff Robertson in an Academy Award-winning performance. It also inspired numerous adaptations, including a 1980 Broadway musical and a 2000 TV movie starring Matthew Modine. "Flowers for Algernon" brought Keyes some of the highest honors in science fiction: the Hugo Award for the 1959 short story and the Nebula Award for the novel.

"Today I'm finding it incredibly poignant that Charlie's last expressed wish in both the short story and the novel is that someone put flowers on Algernon's grave."

"I was deeply moved and always in awe of the way Keyes used subtle changes in voice to illustrate the mutating nature of Charlie's intelligence," Steven Gould, president of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, said this week. But when Algernon regresses, Charlie realizes that the same fate awaits him. The novel takes the form of Charlie's journal entries or "progris riports," which are filled with his spelling and grammatical mistakes until he undergoes an operation that enhances his intelligence, much as it had with Algernon, the lab mouse that had the surgery first. "Flowers for Algernon," which Keyes initially wrote as a short story, goes inside the head of Charlie Gordon, a man with an IQ of 68 who is painfully aware of his mental limits and yearns to be smart. Daniel Keyes, whose fascination with the workings of the mind drove a writing career that produced the classic 1966 novel "Flowers for Algernon," died June 15 at his South Florida home of complications from pneumonia, his family said.