#5 in Classics
Flowers for Algernon
- 274
- Pages
- about 5 h
- Reading time
- Hugo Award for Best Short Story
- Nebula Award for Best Novel
- NPR Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books
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Editor’s note Daniel Keyes first wrote it as a short story in 1959, which won the Hugo, and expanded it into the 1966 novel, which shared the Nebula. It is told through Charlie Gordon’s progress reports, whose spelling and grammar change as an experiment raises his intelligence, so the quality of the translation matters a great deal. Cliff Robertson won an Oscar for the 1968 film Charly.
About the book
Flowers for Algernon is a short novelette by American author Daniel Keyes, which he later expanded into a novel and adapted for film and other media. The novelette, written in 1958 and first published in the April 1959 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, won the Hugo Award for Best Short Fiction in 1960. The novel was published in 1966 and was joint winner of that year's Nebula Award for Best Novel, with Babel-17.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.6 across 2,493 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 94% of the weight and the score stays at 8.8 — the Classics average of 7.7 barely moves it. A further +0.20 comes from the small bonus for major awards.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.6 | 108 | 4% |
| Hardcover | 8.6 | 2.4K | 96% |
Frequently asked
How long is Flowers for Algernon?
It has 274 pages — shorter than 82% of the ranked books in Classics.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Classics — with scores between 8.3 and 8.8, closest to this book.
