Yes, Flowers for Algernon Is Banned!

Charlie Gordon is a 32-year-old man with an IQ of 68 who works as a janitor and attends night classes to learn to read and write. Scientists select him for an experimental surgery that has tripled the intelligence of a lab mouse named Algernon. The procedure works. Charlie’s intelligence soars, he reads voraciously, falls in love, and begins to understand how people treated him before. Then Algernon starts to decline. The novel is told entirely through Charlie’s progress reports, and watching his prose evolve and then deteriorate is one of the most devastating structural choices in American fiction.

The book has been challenged repeatedly since the 1970s. Schools in Emporium, Pennsylvania pulled it in 1976, Glen Rose, Arkansas in 1981, and Plant City, Florida in 1984. The primary objection has been a scene where Charlie has a sexual encounter, which challengers deemed inappropriate for school-age readers. Others have objected to profanity and a scene where Charlie questions God’s role in his situation. Schools in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Lubbock, Texas, have required parental permission slips for students to read it.

Why You Should Read This

Flowers for Algernon asks what intelligence is worth if it costs you everything else. Charlie’s journey hits hard because Keyes didn’t flinch at the cruelest parts: the coworkers who were only pretending to be his friends, the woman who loved him but couldn’t reach him, the slow awareness that his brilliance is temporary. The progress-report format means you experience every stage from the inside.

The book is ultimately about dignity. Charlie isn’t a case study or a cautionary tale. He’s a person, and Keyes made you feel every phase of his experience: the innocent eagerness, the bitter awakening, the grief, and the grace of his final reports. When Charlie writes “please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard,” it lands with a force that no amount of literary analysis can prepare you for.