Ken Kesey

Born September 17, 1935
La Junta, Colorado

Died November 10, 2001
Eugene, Oregon

Author and prankster

Ken Kesey was one of the central figures in the "psychedelic sixties," a decade when various people, including many college students, experimented with mind-altering drugs, such as LSD. Kesey was at the forefront of the cultural explosion in the late 1960s that celebrated joyful expressiveness, the rejection of authority, loud rock music, and drug use. As a cultural figure, Kesey is renowned as the leader of the Merry Pranksters, a ragtag group representing the rowdy, fun-loving, anti-authoritarian nature of the psychedelic era. Their epic cross-country bus trip was chronicled by author Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968). As a novelist, Kesey is best known for two works: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) and Sometimes a Great Notion (1964). Kesey remained a hero to countercultural rebels—those people who reject the values and behaviors of the majority—until his death in 2001.

"[Kesey] was the man who threw a party in San Francisco and saw half of America show up."

—Douglas Brinkley in Spit in the Ocean #7: All About Kesey, 2003.

All-American youth

Kesey's status as a cultural rebel was in contrast to his wholesome upbringing. He was born Ken Elton Kesey on September 17, 1935, the older of two sons born to Fred and Geneva Kesey. Both of his parents came from farming and ranching families. Kesey spent the first ten years of his life in Colorado. For five of those years, from 1941 to 1945, his father served with the U.S. Navy in World War II (1939–45). When Kesey's father returned, the family packed up and moved to an area near Eugene, Oregon. Fred began working in dairy farming and before too long had become a successful and well-liked leader in the industry. In fact, he started a dairy marketing cooperative, called the Eugene Farmers Cooperative, that eventually marketed its products under the name Darigold.

Kesey's father taught both of his sons how to hunt, fish, and camp in the beautiful surroundings of Oregon's Willamette Valley. Kesey grew up surrounded by family. The family gatherings were characterized by two things that shaped Kesey's attitudes toward life: competition and storytelling. The men in the family loved to compete in all variety of sports. The boys were invited to join the contests from an early age. At the end of the day, the entire family sat around and told stories, carrying on a tradition handed down from the frontier days of the 1800s and 1900s. Kesey also inherited from his father a real love of reading. From an early age he consumed books of all kinds, from Zane Grey westerns to Tarzan stories to comic books.

Strong, full of energy, and with a sparkling intelligence, Kesey was voted "most likely to succeed" when he graduated from high school in Springfield, Oregon. He went on to study speech and communications at the University of Oregon. He also became an outstanding wrestler in the 174-pound class. In 1956 he married his high-school sweetheart, Faye Haxby, and he graduated from college in 1957. During college Kesey had dabbled in writing for television and radio and also in acting. After graduation he and Faye determined that they would head to California to pursue either acting or writing. When he won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to attend Stanford University's creative writing program, he embarked on a journey that shaped his future career and the culture of the 1960s.

Experimenting in San Francisco

As Kesey journeyed south to San Francisco, he recognized that he was leaving one way of life behind and was eagerly embracing new experiences. His imagination had been fired while reading On the Road (1957), a novel by Jack Kerouac (1922–1969). The book was the literary highpoint for the Beatniks, a group of intellectuals and poets who rebelled against established values in the 1950s. Kesey was excited about Kerouac's ideas on individual expression. However, he did not want to be part of an existing artistic movement like the Beats. He wanted to be part of something new and original. He found a group of people at Stanford who were eager to push the boundaries of both literary expression and personal behavior. Living in a neighborhood called Perry Lane, Kesey began to recreate his life.

The writers and intellectuals teaching or attending school at Stanford or living in Perry Lane were impressive. Kesey's teachers included noted writers Wallace Stegner (1909–1993), Richard Scowcroft (1916–2001), and Frank O'Connor (1903–1966), and influential editor Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989). His classmates Larry McMurtry (1936–), Wendell Berry (1934–), and Robert Stone (1937–) would all go on to write important novels. Together, these writers pushed each other to explore new literary territory. Under this literary influence, Kesey wrote a novel called "Zoo" about Beat life in San Francisco, but the novel was never published.

Kesey's experiments did not end with literary expression. In order to support his pregnant wife, in 1959 Kesey took a job as night attendant at a psychiatric hospital near San Francisco. At the hospital, Kesey volunteered for experiments that doctors were conducting with so-called "psychomimetic," or mind-altering, drugs. These included lysergic acid diethylamide, more commonly called LSD; psilocybin; mescaline; peyote; and other drugs. In the early 1960s Harvard professor Timothy Leary (1920–1996; see entry) spoke out in favor of LSD experimentation. Kesey thrilled to the mind-expanding effects of the drugs, which were then legal. The drugs seemed to allow him to see things he had never seen before. He credited them with unlocking his creative potential. He and his friends at Perry Lane experimented regularly with these drugs and with marijuana. In fact, Kesey was working at the hospital under the influence of peyote, a drug that causes hallucinations or delusions, when he saw a vision of an enormous Native American patient who eluded the control of the nursing establishment. It was this vision that gave the spark to his most-praised novel.

LSD: The Road to Enlightenment and Back

In the early 2000s, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) was widely known as an illegal drug that causes the user to see visions that bear little or no relationship to reality. But the drug was not always illegal. In fact, LSD was once considered as a possible treatment for a number of psychological troubles, from schizophrenia to alcoholism.

LSD was first developed in 1938 by Swiss chemist Dr. Albert Hoffman. It was perfected by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (a forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA) as a possible "truth drug" to be used on captured prisoners to make them confess. After World War II (1939–45), the CIA launched a series of tests of LSD on civilians. These experiments led to the development of powerful forms of LSD that caused lengthy hallucinogenic episodes, nicknamed "trips." For many users, these trips were intense experiences that seemed to reveal new ways of perceiving the world, even new ways of experiencing spirituality or communion with the supernatural.

The growing reputation of LSD as a mind-altering drug created interest among psychiatrists and researchers at universities such as Stanford and Harvard. They began to sponsor widespread studies of the drug, paying college students and others to swallow doses while under observation. LSD became a popular drug among rebellious young intellectuals such as Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, and others in the counterculture of the mid-1960s.

This widespread drug use began to alarm various healthcare workers, police officers, politicians, and other citizens. This concern was increased by reports that some users experienced "bad trips," which caused injuries or even death. For example, reports surfaced that LSD made some users feel like they could fly. Some who tried to fly from the tops of buildings fell to their deaths instead. In 1966 the drug was made illegal. Fans of the drug claimed that the authorities made it illegal because they were afraid that if everybody attained the enlightenment made possible by LSD, the government and police would no longer be necessary. Making the drug illegal only increased its popularity among people taking part in the countercultural movement. By the early 1970s, however, interest in the drug subsided. LSD became one of a number of illegal drugs that circulated in music clubs and discos, mostly in urban areas. In the early 2000s, while the drug remained illegal and versions of it available on the street could be very dangerous, chemists were still researching the therapeutic possibilities of LSD-based drugs.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was shaped by several forces. These included Kesey's ongoing drug experimentation and the influence of Beat writer Jack Kerouac. The work was also inspired by Kesey's experiences working in a mental hospital at a time when psychiatric inmates were often treated very severely. The work was completed under the guiding wisdom of editor Malcolm Cowley. Large parts of the book were written while Kesey was under the influence of hallucinogenic or mind-altering drugs. This led him to write in a loose, rambling style. Cowley advised Kesey how to contain these drug-inspired episodes in a more tightly structured narrative. The result was a book that became an instant classic. It was later made into a Broadway play and an award-winning movie, starring Jack Nicholson. In the early 2000s the book was still read in high school and college courses, praised for its message of anti-authoritarianism and its unique style.

As the novel opens, a group of confined mental patients are being carefully controlled by hospital staff through a combination of drugs, force, and intimidation. The staff are led by a stern and cruel authority figure, Nurse Ratched. Soon, Randle McMurphy enters the hospital as a patient. Confident and swaggering, he is a "hundred-percent American con man," according to the book. McMurphy has conned his way into the mental hospital to avoid hard work in a state prison. He immediately sets out to disrupt and weaken the power structure at the hospital. He encourages the patients to ignore the rules of the institution and leads them in various outrageous pranks. His rebellious energy only confuses some of the mentally ill patients. However, McMurphy inspires a huge Native American patient named Chief Bromden (who is the book's narrator) to imagine a life outside the institution. Nurse Ratched finally crushes McMurphy's rebellious spirit by forcing him to undergo a lobotomy, a surgical procedure on the brain that decreases mental function. Denying Ratched her victory, Bromden smothers his friend McMurphy and escapes to freedom—and sanity.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest struck a nerve among a generation of younger Americans. The book sold millions of copies. This generation of Americans had grown suspicious of authority figures and the "establishment," a term used to describe the politicians and corporate leaders who control American society. Kesey and his readers identified with the character of Randle McMurphy, a confident smart aleck who showed no fear of authority figures. The way to deal with abusive and rigid authority, suggests McMurphy, is to mock it, reject it, and go one's separate way. It is a model for individual action that pleased many and was followed most notably by Kesey himself.

In his next book, Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), Kesey continued to experiment with style and content. The novel tells the story of a divided Oregon logging family that comes together in defiance of a labor union and the entire local community. Kesey continued to push the boundaries of style. He used unusual techniques, such as remarks in parentheses, to take readers inside the heads of his characters. Although it was not as popular or as critically praised as Cuckoo's Nest, the novel saved Kesey from being considered a one-book author.

Merry Pranksters

During the early 1960s when he was writing about strong, confident, anti-authoritarian figures, Kesey continued to push beyond the boundaries of conventional behavior in his own life. Around 1963 a new force came into Kesey's social circle: Neal Cassady (1926–1968). Cassady was the outrageous traveling companion whom Jack Kerouac had made the hero of On the Road. Cassady, who resembled the McMurphy character from Cuckoo's Nest, and Kesey inspired each other's appetite for mischief. The two became the center of a new social circle that gathered at Kesey's house in the rural town of La Honda, outside San Francisco. Together the pair led a group that called itself the Merry Pranksters.

The Merry Pranksters were committed to experimentation. This included both hallucinogenic drugs (then still legal, but increasingly controversial) and public acts of outrageous behavior. For example, they might interrupt a poetry reading by jumping onto the stage and chasing imaginary rodents with a fly swatter. Or they might hold impromptu parades in the middle of a town. The group brewed big pots of chili laced with LSD and hung out together at the Kesey La Honda farm.

In 1964 the Merry Pranksters had the wild idea that they should take their activities on the road. They bought a 1939 bus, painted it in psychedelic colors, and took off on a journey across the United States. During that summer, the rowdy Pranksters wandered across the country, taking drugs, staging pranks, and filming their exploits. They stopped to visit some of the figureheads of American rebellion, including Timothy Leary and Jack Kerouac. Their behavior was so excessive that both Leary and Kerouac found them unbearable to be around for long. The best record of the journey remains author Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Getting off the bus

Life with the Merry Pranksters took a toll on Kesey's writing and eventually got him into trouble with the law. In 1965 he was arrested for possession of marijuana. Rather than serve jail time, he fled to Mexico. The thrill of being on the run from the law soon wore thin, however. Kesey turned himself in to the police in California. After he served a six-month jail term, he and his family moved back to Oregon in November of 1967, settling near his relatives in Pleasant Hill.

Following the publication of Wolfe's book in 1968, Kesey became something of a countercultural hero. Young people who were just beginning to experiment with drug use and rebellion looked to him as a sort of guru, or spiritual teacher. Many made visits to his Oregon farm. Yet Kesey no longer felt like a hero, as he recounted in his story The Day After Superman Died (1980). He denied any special wisdom or knowledge, especially about the revolutionary politics that were so important to the youth movements of the late 1960s. Kesey wrote: "I know more about my brother's creamery than I do about the revolution."

Kesey's literary output after the mid-1960s was sporadic and, according to most critics, not up to the standards of his early work. A 1973 work, called Kesey's Garage Sale, was a loose, comic book-style gathering of Prankster memories and assorted writings. It included a screenplay that revealed Kesey's attitudes about his fast-paced life in the mid-1960s. The character had been "amped out on too much something," according to the book. "I don't know whether it was psychedelics, electronics, or heroics." By the end of the story, the character was looking for some way to "get off the bus."

Kesey did "get off the bus" to live a more normal life with his family on his farm in Oregon. He had two children. He wrote several other works, including two books for children and a well-received novel, Sailor Song (1992). Kesey also helped edit a series of miscellaneous collections called Spit in the Ocean. He suffered a stroke in 1997 and died of liver cancer in 2001. He is remembered as one of the most brilliant and adventurous writers of the psychedelic era.

For More Information

Books

Carnes, Bruce. Ken Kesey. Boise, ID: Boise State University Press, 1974.

Kesey, Ken. The Day After Superman Died. Northridge, CA: Lord John Press, 1980.

Kesey, Ken. Kesey's Garage Sale. New York: Viking, 1973.

Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. New York: Viking, 1962.

Kesey, Ken. Sometimes a Great Notion. New York: Viking, 1964.

McClanahan, Ed, ed. Spit in the Ocean #7: All About Kesey. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Perry, Paul. On the Bus: The Complete Guide to the Legendary Trip of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and the Birth of the Counterculture. New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1990.

Stevens, Jay. Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream. New York: Grove Press, 1987.

Tanner, Stephen L. Ken Kesey. Boston, MA: Twayne, 1983.

Wolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1968.

Ken Kesey

In 1962 American writer Ken Kesey (1935–2001) rose to prominence when Viking Press published his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Kesey served as a primary link between the Beatniks of the 1950s and the counter-culture movement of the mid-to-late 1960s, and his 1964 cross-country journey with a band of followers known as the Merry Pranksters was immortalized by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in 1968. In 1975 a film version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest received five Academy Awards, spreading Kesey's vision to a new generation.

Lived All-American Youth

Over time, Kesey would be seen as one of the primary trendsetters of the counter-culture movement during the 1960s; as a child and young man, however, his dreams and accomplishments were "all-American." He was born Ken Elton Kesey on September 17, 1935, in La Junta, Colorado, the son of Fred A. and Geneve (Smith) Kesey. Beginning in 1941, the family moved several times, eventually settling in Eugene, Oregon, in 1946. Fred Kesey founded Eugene Farmers Cooperative, which marketed Darigold products. Kesey later described his family as "hard shell" Baptists, and he retained great respect for the Bible into adulthood. He and his younger brother Joe (known as Chuck) loved the outdoors, and spent their leisure time fishing for salmon and trout, and hunting for duck and deer. Kesey also enjoyed physical sports like boxing and racing, and was active in both wrestling and football at Springfield (Eugene's adjacent city) high school. His classmates voted him most likely to succeed.

Kesey's accomplishments and interests expanded far beyond the outdoors and physical sports. Kesey decorated sets for assemblies and plays, wrote skits, and won an award for best thespian. He also had a fascination with magic that extended to ventriloquism and hypnotism. Before Kesey enrolled in the University of Oregon's speech and communications program, he spent the summer in Hollywood attempting to find bit parts. He would return the following summer, and though he found little success, he relished the new experience and the people he met.

As with high school, Kesey was an active student at the University of Oregon, participating in the theater, sports, and fraternities. Academically, his major directed his energies toward acting and writing for television and radio. He won a second thespian award at college, and wrote several drama and documentary scripts for a course offered by Dean Starlin. Kesey simultaneously pursued his love of sports, eventually earning a Fred Lowe Scholarship in wrestling. "His friends in Drama could not understand why he was on the wrestling team and associated with athletes," noted Stephen L. Tanner in his book Ken Kesey, "and of course his friends among the athletes could not understand why he would involve himself with the theater group." On May 20, 1956, while at the university, Kesey married his childhood sweetheart, Faye Haxby.

Experienced Dramatic Life Change

Kesey earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1957 and returned home to Eugene, where he worked in the dairy business for a year. He had decided to become a writer, though his future remained uncertain: with his teachers' urging he had applied for a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, which would allow him to continue his education, but there was also the possibility that he would be drafted. Both the answer to the fellowship and draft question arrived in the mail on the same day. Because of a shoulder injury from wrestling, Kesey was classified as 4F, disqualifying him for military service. The Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, on the other hand, was granted, allowing him to sign up for the writing program at Stanford in 1958.

At Stanford, Kesey studied under Wallace Stegner and Malcolm Cowley, and completed his first unpublished novel about college athletics. While Kesey's teachers at Stanford had a significant impact on his writing, he was also greatly influenced by his fellow students and the cultural movements surrounding the community. Kesey befriended Larry McMurty, Robert Stone, and Wendell Berry, and participated in contentious but constructive roundtable discussions with his fellow writers. He formed his closest friendship with Ken Babbs, and the two would become tight-knit co-conspirators in the coming years. Kesey was also attracted to the beat culture. He visited the nearby beat scene of North Beach, and read works by Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Clellan Holmes. In a short time, the teetotaling Kesey with a Baptist background was wearing a beard, smoking marijuana, and working on a second novel titled Zoo, about the North Beach beat scene. Although he was unable to find a publisher for the novel, Stanford granted him the $2,000 Saxton Prize for a section of the book.

Kesey lived at Perry Lane while at Stanford, a block-long row of cottages on the outskirts of a golf course within Menlo Park. Perry Lane had a long, bohemian tradition, and Kesey and his friends quickly became a part of that tradition. "In the Lane he was introduced to wine drinking, marijuana smoking, wife swapping, and a variety of new attitudes and practices," wrote Tanner. His most radical transformation, however, came after he enlisted in a number of experiments at the Veterans' Hospital in Menlo Park at the suggestion of a friend, Vic Lovell. There, Kesey was paid to ingest a number of psychedelic substances including LSD, an experience that led to his own experimentation with hallucinogenics in order to heighten consciousness. Later, he was hired as an aide at the hospital where he worked third shift.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Kesey's next novel was based on his work at the Veterans' Hospital and influenced by his ongoing use of psychedelics, and served to make him a notable literary figure. Narrated by the character Chief Bromden, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest tells the story of Randle Patrick McMurphy, an exuberant, vivacious outsider who avoids a correction facility sentence by pleading insanity. He is sent to a mental hospital where his vitality and willingness to stand up to the oppressive Big Nurse Ratched re-energizes a number of inmates whom he befriends. Kesey, reportedly, even received a clandestine treatment of shock therapy to aide his descriptions of the hospital experience. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest's metaphor, which centered on the relationships between authority figures and the oppressed, posed a larger social question for the so-called silent generation, born and reared in America's middle class suburbs: Are the people in charge (the government, the corporations) less sane than the people following orders (citizens, workers)? Kesey finished the book in the summer of 1961, and with the help of Cowley, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was published by Viking in February of 1962. The book became an immediate critical and popular success.

Kesey returned to Eugene briefly in the summer of 1961 and worked at the creamery with his brother Chuck. He started gathering material for his next book, Sometimes a Great Notion, and continued working on the manuscript when he returned to Perry Lane in the fall. Unlike One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which took ten months to write, the new book would take two years. As he worked on the project, One Few Over the Cuckoo's Nest continued to gain attention. In 1963–64, a Broadway version, adapted by Dale Wasserman, starred Kirk Douglas and ran for 82 performances. The book also sold well, allowing Kesey the money necessary to buy land in La Honda, California, an isolated locality in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Kesey finished Sometimes a Great Notion in La Honda, and Viking published it in 1964. While the book never achieved the critical and popular success of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, many critics prefer it. "In terms of struc-ture, point of view, and theme," wrote Barry H. Leeds in his book Ken Kesey, "it is more ambitious, more experimental, and ultimately more successful."

Initiated Mythic Bus Trip

After Kesey finished Sometimes a Great Notion, he bought a 1939 International Harvester School Bus (called Furthur) and planned a cross-country trip to New York City that coincided with the book's publication in July of 1964. The trip, however, would be unlike any that Americans had ever witnessed, with Kesey serving as the unofficial leader of a small group of friends who had gathered at La Honda. Together, they prepared the International Harvester for the trip, installing tape players and loud speakers, painting it psychedelic colors, and stocking various psychedelics (LSD was legal at the time), and the crew left La Honda on June 14, 1964. Kesey and the "Merry Pranksters" embarked upon an expedition that served as a signpost to a rising generation, introducing the hippy prototype to American towns and cities from coast-to-coast. "It became a metaphor for the carefree (and, at times, careless), hedonistic, authority-challenging, back-to-nature, alternative-seeking qualities of the 1960s," wrote Paul Berry in the book On the Bus.

By the end of August of 1964, Kesey and the Pranksters had returned to La Honda. Kesey busied himself editing 45 hours of home movies taken during the trip, though he was unable to shape the footage into a theatrical release. As the unorthodox community around Kesey grew, it attracted more attention from both neighbors and law enforcement. On April 23, 1965, the police arrested Kesey and he was charged with possession of marijuana. During this time, Kesey and the Pranksters also conducted a series of "Acid-Tests," festival-like events held at various venues where LSD was introduced to a wider audience. Following a second drug arrest at the beginning of 1966, Kesey left the United States for Mexico to avoid prosecution. He remained in Mexico for the next nine months, where he, his family, and followers continued living a lifestyle similar to the one they had established in La Honda. When Kesey returned to the United States, he eventually received two light sentences totaling nine months and a $1500 fine.

Settled on Oregon Farm

Following his release, Kesey moved his family and members of the Merry Pranksters to a farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, which remained his residence for the rest of his life. In 1969 he decided to forego a trip with the Pranksters to the Woodstock Festival, and made it clear that they were unwelcome at his farm upon their return. Kesey remained relatively isolated until 1973 when he published Kesey's Garage Sale, a collection of commentaries and plays. In 1986 he published a second collection, Demon Box, followed by the children's book, Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear, in 1990.

Kesey released Sailor Song in 1992, his first novel since Sometimes a Great Notion 28 years earlier. Set in an Alaskan fishing village of Kunjak, Sailor Song takes place in the near future, following a number of ecological disasters. Critical reaction to the book was mixed. "If Kesey himself weren't a cult figure of sorts," suggested Gene Lyons in Entertainment Weekly, "Sailor Song would probably not have been published." Publisher's Weekly, however, noted that the book found Kesey's "baroque humor in top form."

The influence of Kesey's life and work, especially during the 1960s, has had a broad impact on American culture. Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' mythic bus trip and counter-culture lifestyle was immortalized in Tom Wolfe's highly popular nonfiction book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, in 1968. Wolfe was one of the first commentators to identify Kesey as the essential link between the beatnik culture of the 1950s and the hippy culture of the mid-to-late 1960s. In the 1990s, even the Smithsonian Institute recognized Kesey's cultural impact, and attempted (unsuccessfully) to purchase the "Furthur" bus. By the mid-1970s, when One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest had been turned into an Academy Award film, the book itself had sold over four million copies and been adapted to countless college courses. In 2006 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was transformed once again, this time into a musical.

Kesey suffered a mild stroke in 1997. Four years later, on November 10, 2001, Kesey died of liver cancer in Eugene, Oregon, at the age of 66. "All his life," wrote novelist Robert Stone in the New Yorker, "he was searching for the philosopher's stone that could return the world to the pure story from which it was made."

Books

Babbs, Ken, and Paul Perry, On the Bus: The Complete Gude to the Legendary Trip of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and the Birth of the Counterculture, Thunder's Mouth Press, 1990.

Leeds, Barry H., Ken Kesey, Frederick Ungar, 1981.

Tanner, Stephen L., Ken Kesey, Twayne, 1983.

Periodicals

Entertainment Weekly, August 28, 1992.

New Yorker, June 14, 2004.

Publishers Weekly, June 22, 1992.

KESEY, Ken (Elton)

Nationality: American. Born: La Junta, Colorado, 17 September 1935. Education: A high school in Springfield, Oregon; University of Oregon, Eugene, B.A. 1957; Stanford University, California (Woodrow Wilson fellow), 1958-59. Family: Married Faye Haxby in 1956; four children (one deceased). Career: Ward attendant in mental hospital, Menlo Park, California; president, Intrepid Trips film company, 1964. Since 1974 publisher, Spit in the Ocean magazine, Pleasant Hill, Oregon. Served prison term for marijuana possession, 1967. Awards: Saxton Memorial Trust award, 1959. Address: 85829 Ridgeway Road, Pleasant Hill, Oregon 97455, U.S.A.

Publications

Novels

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. New York, Viking Press, 1962;London, Methuen, 1963.

Sometimes a Great Notion. New York, Viking Press, 1964; London, Methuen, 1966.

Demon Box. New York, Viking, and London, Methuen, 1986.

Caverns, with others. New York, Viking, 1990.

The Further Inquiry. New York, Viking, 1990.

Sailor Song. New York, Viking, 1992; London, Black Swan, 1993.

Last Go Round, with Ken Babbs. New York, Viking, 1994.

Short Stories

The Day Superman Died. Northridge, California, Lord John Press, 1980.

Uncollected Short Stories

"The First Sunday in October," in Northwest Review (Seattle), Fall 1957.

"McMurphy and the Machine," in Stanford Short Stories 1962, edited by Wallace Stegner and Richard Scowcroft. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 1962.

"Letters from Mexico," in Ararat (New York), Autumn 1967.

"Excerpts from Kesey's Jail Diary," in Ramparts (Berkeley, California), November 1967.

"Correspondence," in Tri-Quarterly (Evanston, Illinois), Spring 1970.

"Once a Great Nation," in Argus (College Park, Maryland), April 1970.

"Dear Good Dr. Timothy," in Augur (Eugene, Oregon), 19 November 1970.

"Cut the Motherfuckers Loose," in The Last Whole Earth Catalog. San Francisco, Straight Arrow, 1971.

"The Bible," "Dawgs," "The I Ching," "Mantras," "Tools from My Chest," in The Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog-The Realist (New York), March-April 1971.

"Over the Border," in Oui (Chicago), April 1973.

"'Seven Prayers' by Grandma Whittier," in Spit in the Ocean 1-5 (Pleasant Hill, Oregon), 1974-79.

Other

Kesey's Garage Sale (miscellany; includes screenplay Over the Border ). New York, Viking Press, 1973.

Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear (for children). New York, Viking, 1990.

The Sea Lion: A Story of the Sea Cliff People (for children). NewYork, Viking, 1991.

Manuscript Collections:

University of Oregon, Eugene.

Critical Studies:

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe, New York, Farrar Straus, 1968, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969; Ken Kesey by Bruce Carnes, Boise, Idaho, Boise State College, 1974; "Ken Kesey Issue" of Northwest Review (Eugene, Oregon), vol. 16, nos. 1-2, 1977; Ken Kesey by Barry H. Leeds, New York, Ungar, 1981; The Art of Grit: Ken Kesey's Fiction, Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 1982, and One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest: Rising to Heroism, Boston, Twayne, 1989, both by M. Gilbert Porter; Ken Kesey by Stephen L. Tanner, Boston, Twayne, 1983; On the Bus: The Legendary Trip of Ken Kesey and the Merry Prankstersby Ken Babbs, photographs by Rob Bivert, New York, Thunder's Mouth Press, 1989, London, Plexus, 1991.

Ken Kesey's celebrity and critical reputation were instantly established with the publication of his first two novels. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was a widely popular commercial success as a novel and was also successful in its adaptations for stage and screen. Sometimes a Great Notion was initially received with some critical reservations. Seen as an ambitious but not altogether satisfying attempt to enter the rank of great American novels, it has since received more favorable attention from the academic critics, though it has not found a secure place in the established canon of contemporary American literature. After finishing it, Kesey announced a shift from "literature" to "life," and achieved a great deal of public notoriety in the process of making the change. He was frequently public news during the late 1960s, forming a band of "Merry Pranksters" (reported on at length in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test ) who attempted to live life as a work of comic fiction. His arrest and conviction for marijuana possession made still more news and provided experiences that he would frequently exploit in his writing. Stray and often occasional pieces of a miscellaneous nature were published in countercultural venues during the late 1960s and early 1970s, suggesting that perhaps a new project was in the works, and some of these were assembled in Kesey's Garage Sale, an apt title for a collection of miscellaneous items. In 1986 a more ambitious collection was assembled for Demon Box, a series of largely autobiographical pieces that continued to look back in time to the historical period of Kesey's public notoriety. The volume is loosely united by a first-person narrator whose name, Devlin Deboree (pronounced debris ), hints at a devil-may-care attitude towards social and artistic conventions, and at the disorganized, self-consciously problematic value of his observations.

Both of Kesey's early novels are richly northwestern and regional in setting and atmosphere, with a strong sense of the incursion of the white man on the Indian's land and way of life. The emphasis is a bit one-sided in Cuckoo's Nest, which is set in a mental institution and has for its stream-of-consciousness narrator a "dumb" (thought to be deaf, but in fact choosing not to speak) Indian nick-named Chief, whose father was the last chief of his tribe. The novel can be read as an allegory of how the invaders have been driven to subjugate the Native Americans because they are a reminder of what must be sacrificed in the process of western civilization and its discontents, and an exploration of the power struggle between a desire to be free and the fearful consequences of that freedom. Most of the characters confined in the institution could leave if they wished; but their fear of the outside is more intense than their hatred of the inside, until the raucous protagonist McMurphy comes along to inspire their lapsed self-confidence and zest for life. Recognizable as a tragicomic parodic microcosm of the world we all live in, the book captures and reflects the reality of a Walt Disney world, as perceived through the eyes of the "Big Chief" who used to be on the bright red covers of the writing tablets of children all over the United States, but who is now pretending to be a vegetable in a nut house. What he sees is "Like a cartoon world, where the figures are flat and outlined in black, jerking through some kind of goofy story that might be real funny if it weren't for the cartoon figures being real guys …" The comic-book quality has lent itself nicely to dramatic production, as have the compactness and wild humor of the novel. These qualities also tempt one to allegorize, but at the same time mock the attempt as absurd, for the work is not itself allegorical. It is a report on the way people choose to see themselves and their world in allegorical or comic-book fashion. The reality of the villain, "Big Nurse," is as exaggerated by the characters who fear and hate her as it is by the novelist. It is their insecurity and weakness that feed her power and make her "big," while the institution, with its equipment and routines, becomes the pretext for sociological and cultural myths pushed to an exaggerated but all-too-plausible extreme. The prefrontal lobotomy performed on McMurphy at the end is any operation on or treatment of or way of seeing a man designed to limit him for his own sake, to protect him from his own human nature. The Big Nurse is that spirit which loves the "idea" of man so much it can't allow individual men to exist.

Sometimes a Great Notion was Kesey's stab at writing the great American novel in a Faulknerian mode, and it deserves more attention than can be given it here. Like an Absalom, Absalom! set in Oregon, intensely regional, with elaborate and intricately complex narrative structure (flashbacks, shifts of point of view), the work demands several readings. With such attention, what at first seem like gratuitous confusions and exploitations of narrative technique begin to emerge as the necessary supports for a novelistic structure which commands respect even though it fails in the end to achieve its full potential. In this novel Kesey aimed high, and he came impressively close to his target. The publication two decades later of Demon Box produces the effect of a long-deferred anti-climax. Lingering colloquially and nostalgically over his acquaintances and escapades in the 1960s and 1970s, in a deliberately naive reportage style, this work often succeeds in capturing the colloquial idiom of prison life or Hell's Angels banter, but it does little to enhance Kesey's reputation as an innovative writer of the first rank. As if aware of this critical judgment, Kesey deliberately prefaced the book with a poem called "TARNISHED GALAHAD—what the judge called him at his trial, " two lines of which ask and answer the significant question:

Tarnished Galahad—did your sword get rusted?

Tarnished Galahad—there's no better name!

—Thomas A. Vogler