Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey (born September 17, 1935, La Junta, Colorado, U.S.—died November 10, 2001, Eugene, Oregon) was an American writer who was a prominent figure of the countercultural revolution and the hippie movement of the 1960s. His best-known novel is One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), but he became equally famous for his psychedelic adventures as the leader of a roving band of acolytes and performance artists called the Merry Pranksters.

(Read Britannica’s article on “9 American Countercultural Books.”)

Early life and education

Kesey’s parents, Fred and Geneva (née Smith) Kesey, were dairy farmers who moved from Colorado to Springfield, Oregon, with their young sons, Ken and Chuck, after World War II. In high school Kesey was a star wrestler, and he excelled in the sport at the University of Oregon, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in speech and communications in 1957. The previous year he married Faye Haxby, his high-school sweetheart, and the couple moved to Los Angeles not long after Kesey graduated from college. While in Los Angeles, Kesey worked on his first novel, End of Autumn, which was never published.

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In 1958 Kesey was accepted as a creative writing fellow at Stanford University, where he studied alongside Wendell Berry, Robert Stone, Larry McMurtry, and Peter Beagle. During his two-year fellowship, his wife became pregnant with their first child, and Kesey took a job as an aide at a Veterans Administration hospital in Menlo Park, California. There he was also a paid volunteer experimental subject, taking mind-altering drugs and reporting on their effects.

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

This experience at the hospital served as background for One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which is set in a mental hospital and offers a powerful critique of psychiatric practices of the time. The book became a classic of modern American literature, although some feminist critics regard the novel’s portrayal of women, particularly the character of the steely Nurse Mildred Ratched, also known as “Big Nurse,” as misogynistic. In 1975 the novel was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film, directed by Miloš Forman and starring Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher.

(Read Britannica’s article “What Was the Best Year for Movies?”)

Countercultural jaunts with the Merry Pranksters

Kesey further examined values in conflict in Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), which was made into a film in 1971, featuring Paul Newman (who also directed), Henry Fonda, and Lee Remick. In the nonfiction Kesey’s Garage Sale (1973), Demon Box (1986), and The Further Inquiry (1990), Kesey wrote of his travels and LSD-fueled experiences with the Merry Pranksters. The group had traveled throughout the United States in a bus (nicknamed “Furthur” or “Further”) during the 1960s and had conducted psychedelic “acid tests” in San Francisco. Among their contingent was Neal Cassady, the real-life inspiration for the character of Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road (1957), which had been a major influence on Kesey.

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New Journalism writer Tom Wolfe recounted many of the group’s adventures in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968). Their exploits are also chronicled in the documentary Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place (2011).

Law troubles and personal life

In 1967 Kesey fled to Mexico to avoid prosecution for possession of marijuana. He returned to California, served a brief sentence, and then moved to a farm near Eugene, Oregon.

Kesey and his wife had three children: Jed, Zane, and Shannon Kesey. He also had a daughter, Sunshine, with Carolyn Adams, a Merry Prankster who was known as “Mountain Girl” to the group.

Later works and death

In 1988 Kesey published a children’s book, Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear. With 13 of his graduate students in creative writing at the University of Oregon, he wrote a mystery novel, Caverns (1990), under the joint pseudonym of O.U. Levon, which read backward is “novel U.O. (University of Oregon).” In Sailor Song (1992), a comedy set in an Alaskan fishing village that becomes the backdrop for a Hollywood film, Kesey examined environmental crises and the end of the world. Subsequently, with the collaboration of fellow Merry Prankster Ken Babbs, he wrote a neo-western, Last Go Round (1994).

Kesey died in 2001 from complications after surgery to remove a cancerous tumor on his liver.