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What if you could volunteer to take part in an experiment that would triple your intelligence level? How would your new ability affect your relationships to other people and your feelings about yourself? Those are the questions posed by Daniel Keyes in Flowers for Algernon, the 1966 novel for which he is best known. In the story, a mentally retarded man in his early thirties agrees to an experimental neurological operation that bolsters his below-average intelligence to the genius level--but only temporarily, as the impermanently enlightened character realizes to his distress. Categorized as science fiction, the novel supersedes such easy classification, its concerns, as Mark R. Hillegas noted in Saturday Review, "moral, social, psychological, theological, or philosophical problems imagined as resulting from inventions, discoveries or scientific hypotheses." Flowers for Algernon was the first of Keyes's three novels and three nonfiction works that grappled with the mysterious world of mental processes, particularly those at a remove from the average person's thinking.
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