Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey (1935-2001), American writer. Kesey is best known for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), which examines the conflicts between free will and social conformity that became an important issue during the 1960s. Kesey was also an early proponent of the countercultural lifestyle and the use of mind-altering drugs, forming a loose group known as the Merry Pranksters that celebrated these movements.

Born in La Junta, Colorado, Kesey moved with his family to Springfield, Oregon, as a child. He attended the University of Oregon, where he was on the wrestling team and acted in student plays, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1957. After graduation Kesey moved to California, where he enrolled in a graduate creative writing program at Stanford University and wrote two novels, The End of Autumn and Zoo. Neither was published.

In 1959, while still at Stanford, Kesey signed up at a nearby hospital to participate in experiments involving hallucinogenic drugs. He subsequently took a job as a night attendant in the hospital’s mental ward. These were pivotal experiences in Kesey’s life, inspiring both his later drug use and the themes of Cuckoo’s Nest. The novel, about a group of mental patients and the domineering head nurse who controls them with powerful drugs and shock therapy, was an immediate success and established Kesey’s reputation as a writer. It was made into a 1975 motion picture starring Jack Nicholson that won five Academy Awards, including best picture. Kesey rejected the film, however, because he felt the screenplay and casting did not remain true to his original vision.

Kesey moved back to Oregon, where he bought a farm and wrote his next novel, Sometimes a Great Notion (1964). The book tells the story of struggles within a family of Oregon loggers. During this time Kesey became the leader of a group known as the Merry Pranksters, which held huge “happenings” featuring psychedelic light shows, music, and drugs. To promote his book, Kesey and the Pranksters undertook a cross-country trip to New York in an old school bus, a journey that was memorialized in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) by American writer Tom Wolfe. Some social historians have called Kesey and the Pranksters the link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippie movement of the late 1960s.

Following arrests for marijuana possession in 1965 and 1966, Kesey fled to Mexico, only to be arrested again upon his return to the United States in 1966. He served a short prison sentence and returned to his farm in 1967. Kesey published several collections of shorter pieces over the next two decades, including Demon Box (1987), a compilation of short stories, essays, memoirs, and poems. In the early 1990s he taught fiction writing at the University of Oregon.

In 1992 Kesey published a third novel, Sailor Song, about a small Alaskan fishing settlement invaded by a Los Angeles film crew. Two years later he collaborated with American writer Ken Babbs on Last Go Round: A Dime Western, a novel about an Oregon rodeo in 1911. Kesey also authored two children’s books, Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear (1990) and The Sea Lion (1991).