Ken Kesey

Kenneth Elton Kesey (September 17, 1935 – November 10, 2001) was an American novelist, essayist, and countercultural figure. He considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.

Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado, and grew up in Springfield, Oregon, graduating from the University of Oregon in 1957. He began writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1960 after completing a graduate fellowship in creative writing at Stanford University; the novel was an immediate commercial and critical success when published two years later. During this period, Kesey was used by the CIA (supposedly without his knowledge) in the Project MKULTRA involving hallucinogenic drugs (including mescaline and LSD), which was done to try to make people insane to put them under the control of interrogators.

After One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was published, Kesey moved to nearby La Honda, California, and began hosting "happenings" with former colleagues from Stanford, bohemian and literary figures including Neal Cassady and other friends, who became collectively known as the Merry Pranksters. As documented in Tom Wolfe's 1968 New Journalism book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, some of the parties were promoted to the public as Acid Tests, and integrated the consumption of LSD with multimedia performances. He mentored the Grateful Dead, who were the Acid Tests' house band, and continued to exert a profound influence upon the group throughout their career.

Kesey's second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, was a commercial success that polarized some critics and readers upon its release in 1964. An epic account of the vicissitudes of an Oregon logging family that aspired to the modernist grandeur of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha saga, Kesey regarded it as his magnum opus.