Charlie embarks on a compelling but dangerous journey from retardation to genius. Oscar-winning film Charly starring Cliff Robertson and Claire Bloom -- a mentally challenged man receives an operation that turns him into a genius ... and introduces him to heartache. When we first meet Charlie he is about to embark on a compelling but dangerous journey from retardation to genius. He has only a vague understanding of what will happen, but he is aware that knowledge and the ability to write are of paramount importance. So he doesn't hesitate for a moment to cooperate in a radical experiment designed to increase his intelligence, the key -- he hopes -- to being valued as a human being and to being loved. Daniel Keyes's powerful and highly original story of a young man whose quest for intelligence and knowledge parallels that of Algernon (the mouse who is an earlier subject of a similar experiment) remains unique in imaginative literature. We follow Charlie Gordon's mental, emotional, and spiritual growth. We watch with excitement as he becomes the focus of attention by the scientific world, his intellectual capacities far surpassing those of the psychologists and neurosurgeons who engineered his metamorphosis. We also follow the progress of his romance with two women, one who knew him before the experiment as well as with another, who knows him only as the attractive, bright, and sympathetic man he has become. And, finally, we hope against hope that what happens suddenly, unexpectedly, to Algernon will not happen to Charlie.

The distinguished Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy was sitting in a Budapest café, wondering whether to write a long-planned monograph on modern man or a new play, when he was disturbed by the roaring—so loud as to drown out all other noises—of a passing train. Soon it was gone, only to be succeeded by another. And another. Strange, Karinthy thought, it had been years since Budapest had streetcars. Only then did he realize he was suffering from an auditory hallucination of extraordinary intensity. What in fact Karinthy was suffering from was a brain tumor, not cancerous but hardly benign, though it was only much later—after spells of giddiness, fainting fits, friends remarking that his handwriting had altered, and books going blank before his eyes—that he consulted a doctor and embarked on a series of examinations that would lead to brain surgery. Karinthy’s description of his descent into illness and his observations of his symptoms, thoughts, and feelings, as well as of his friends’ and doctors’ varied responses to his predicament, are exact and engrossing and entirely free of self-pity. A Journey Round My Skull is not only an extraordinary piece of medical testimony, but a powerful work of literature—one that dances brilliantly on the edge of extinction.