Mentally retarded Charlie Gordon participates in an experiment which turns him into a genius. DANIEL KEYES was born in Brooklyn and received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from Brooklyn College. He has been a merchant seaman, ship’s purser, fiction editor and high school teacher. At the present time, Mr. Keyes is on the English faculty at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Flowers for Algernon made its first appearance as a magazine story in 1960 and won the Hugo award that year for the best science novelette. It was then a television drama, is here enlarged to novel length, and is also the basis for a motion picture. Mr. Keyes is the author of a second novel, The Touch, and of the nonfiction book, The Minds of Billy Milligan