Keyes is best known for his Hugo Award winning classic SF
story “Flowers for Algernon” (F&SF, 1959), the Nebula Award winning and
bestselling 1966 novel expansion, and the film version Charly (1968).
Keyes was born August 9, 1927 in New York. He worked
variously as an editor, comics writer, fashion photographer, and teacher before
joining the faculty of Ohio University in 1966, where he taught as a professor
of English and creative writing, becoming professor emeritus in 2000. He
married Aurea Georgina Vaquez in 1952, who predeceased him in 2013; they had
two daughters.
Keyes began working in SF as an associate editor at
Marvel Science Fiction in 1951, and his first SF story was “Precedent” there in
1952. Other novels include The Touch (1968; as The Contaminated Man, 1977), The
Fifth Sally (1980), and The Asylum Prophecies (2009). He had other books
published in Japan, including novel Until Death Do Us Part: The Sleeping
Princess (1998), and wrote true crime volumes including Edgar Award winner The
Minds of Billy Milligan (1982), sequel The Milligan Wars: A True-Story Sequel
(1994 in Japan, forthcoming in the US), and Unveiling Claudia: A True Story of
Serial Murder (1986). His memoir Algernon, Charlie and I: A Writer’s Journey
(2000) discusses the experience of writing the story and its impact on his
life. Keyes was honored as a SFWA Author Emeritus in 2000.
Keyes lived in south Florida, and is survived by his
daughters
“I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
