Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, died on Nov. 10 in Eugene, Ore. following surgery in October to remove a tumor from his liver. He was 66.
Kesey attended the University of Oregon on a wrestling scholarship and graduated in 1957. Later, Kesey went to Stanford to do graduate work on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, enrolling in the creative writing program founded by Wallace Stegner. As a graduate student, he volunteered for an experiment in the psychology department and took mescaline, peyote and LSD, an experience he said changed his life for the better. Following his graduate education, Kesey worked as a night orderly in the psychiatric ward of a Veterans Administration hospital in Menlo Park, Calif., an experience on which he based One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
The novel was published in 1962 and was made into a 1975 movie that was filmed in Oregon and won four Academy Awards, including best picture. Kesey was upset with the outcome of the movie because it took away the perspective from the main character of the novel, schizophrenic Chief Bromden, and swore that he never saw the film.
Perhaps more than his books, it was the 1964 trip with a group of friends who called themselves the Merry Pranksters that made Kesey a cultural icon. Documented in the 1968 Tom Wolfe book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the cross-country trip in a school bus named Furthur was considered to have bridged the gap between the beatniks of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.
Part of the royalties from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest went to finance the Merry Pranksters. Neal Cassady, an inspiration for Jack Kerouac's 1957 On the Road, was the driver of the Merry Pranksters' bus.
Kesey's other high-profile friends included Hunter S. Thomson and the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia. After the death of Timothy Leary in 1996, Kesey said, "[Reporters] come up here expecting me and all my friends to be eaten by drugs and living out of garbage cans. And we're family people. We've put all our kids through college, and we're strong in the community. My wife teaches Sunday school. We're Norman Rockwell, when it comes down to it."
Although Kesey did not write a novel between 1964's Sometimes a Great Notion and 1992's Sailor's Song, he was constantly active as a teacher, writer - including an essay on the Springfield school shootings in Rolling Stone magazine in 1998 - children's book author and prankster. Kesey considered pranks part of his art, and in 1990 announced that he would drive his old psychedelic bus to Washington, D.C., to give it to the Smithsonian Institution. The museum recognized the bus as a new one and rejected the gift.
"When people ask what my best work is, it's the bus," Kesey said last year. "Those books made it possible for the bus to become. I thought you ought to be living your art, rather than stepping back and describing it.
