Daniel Keyes was born in 1923 and grew up in Manhattan, where he attended New York University until he left at 17 to work on oil tankers for the United States Maritime Service and work a wide variety of odd jobs. In 1950, he returned to land and went back to school for a psychology degree, this time at Brooklyn College.
He spent the rest of his life quietly working in science fiction: first as the editor of a pulp magazine and then as a staff writer for a series of comic books. He worked under the legendary Stan Lee in the early 1950s, and produced a pitch for a short science-fiction page-turner that, over the course of many years, eventually developed into Flowers for Algernon. The...
