Daniel Keyes was born in 1927 in Brooklyn, New York. After working as a merchant seaman, he attended Brooklyn College, where he earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees. He went on to become a fiction editor at Marvel Science Fiction and also worked as a high school teacher for developmentally disabled adults. Having periodically published science-fiction stories since the early 1950s, Keyes drew on his experience in the classroom and his love of science fiction to compose a short story called “Flowers for Algernon” in 1959.