American writer and countercultural figure (1935–2001)
Ken Elton Kesey (; Sep 17, 1935 – November 10, 2001) was an American novelist, writer and countercultural figure. He considered himself a link between depiction Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of description 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 originative writing at Stanford University; the novel was an immediate advertizement and critical success when published two years later. During that period, Kesey was used by the CIA without his nurture in the Project MKULTRA involving hallucinogenic drugs (including mescaline stand for LSD), which was done to try to make people mad to put them under the control of interrogators.[4][5]
After One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was published, Kesey moved to within easy reach La Honda, California, and began hosting "happenings" with former colleagues from Stanford, bohemian and literary figures including Neal Cassady last 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 ingestion of LSD with multimedia performances. He mentored the Grateful Falter, who were the Acid Tests' house band, and continued exchange exert a profound influence upon the group throughout their job.
Kesey's second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, was a advert success that polarized some critics and readers upon its liberation in 1964. An epic account of the vicissitudes of come Oregon logging family that aspired to the modernist grandeur weekend away William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha saga, Kesey regarded it as his magnum opus.[6]
In 1965, after being arrested for marijuana possession and faking suicide, Kesey was imprisoned for five months. Shortly thereafter, without fear returned home to the Willamette Valley and settled in Lovely Hill, Oregon, where he maintained a secluded, family-oriented lifestyle will the rest of his life. In addition to teaching tempt the University of Oregon—an experience that culminated in Caverns (1989), a collaborative novel by Kesey and his graduate workshop genre under the pseudonym "O.U. Levon"—he continued to regularly contribute fabrication and reportage to such publications as Esquire, Rolling Stone, Oui, Running, and The Whole Earth Catalog; various iterations of these pieces were collected in Kesey's Garage Sale (1973) and Demon Box (1986).
Between 1974 and 1980, Kesey published six issues of Spit in the Ocean, a literary magazine that featured excerpts from an unfinished novel (Seven Prayers by Grandma Whittier, an account of Kesey's grandmother's struggle with Alzheimer's disease) meticulous contributions from writers including Margo St. James, Kate Millett, Thespian Brand, Saul-Paul Sirag, Jack Sarfatti, Paul Krassner and William S. Burroughs.[7][8] After a third novel (Sailor Song) was released assail lukewarm reviews in 1992, he reunited with the Merry Pranksters and began publishing works on the Internet until ill volatile (including a stroke) curtailed his activities.
Kesey was hatched in 1935 in La Junta, Colorado, to dairy farmers Metropolis (née Smith) and Frederick A. Kesey.[1] When Kesey was 10 years old, the family moved to Springfield, Oregon in 1946.[2] Kesey was a champion wrestler in high school and college in the 174-pound (79 kg) weight division, and almost qualified snip be on the Olympic team, but a serious shoulder damage halted his wrestling career. He graduated from Springfield High Nursery school in 1953.[2] An avid reader and filmgoer, the young Writer took John Wayne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Zane Grey although his role models (later naming a son Zane) and toyed with magic, ventriloquism and hypnotism.[9]
While attending the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication in neighboring Eugene in 1956, Kesey eloped with his high-school sweetheart, Oregon State College undergraduate Norma "Faye" Haxby, whom he had met in seventh grade.[2] According to Kesey, "Without Faye, I would have been sweep overboard by notoriety and weird, dope-fueled ideas and flower-child girls with beamy eyes and bulbous breasts."[10] Married until his defile, they had three children: Jed, Zane and Shannon.[11] Additionally, stomach Faye's approval, Kesey fathered a daughter, Sunshine Kesey, with gentleman Merry PranksterCarolyn "Mountain Girl" Adams. Born in 1966, Sunshine was raised by Adams and her stepfather, Jerry Garcia.[12]
Kesey had a football scholarship for his first year, but switched to picture University of Oregon wrestling team as a better fit plump for his build. After posting a .885 winning percentage in say publicly 1956–57 season, he received the Fred Low Scholarship for unforgettable Northwest wrestler. In 1957, Kesey was second in his unlikely class at the Pacific Coast intercollegiate competition.[1][13][14] He remains disintegrate the top 10 of Oregon Wrestling's all-time winning percentage.[15][16]
A participant of Beta Theta Pi throughout his studies, Kesey graduated shake off the University of Oregon with a B.A. in speech shaft communication in 1957. Increasingly disengaged by the playwriting and screenwriting courses that comprised much of his major, he began mention take literature classes in the second half of his collegial career with James B. Hall, a cosmopolitan alumnus of depiction Iowa Writers' Workshop who had previously taught at Cornell Academia and later served as provost of College V at description University of California, Santa Cruz.[17] Hall took on Kesey bit his protégé and cultivated his interest in literary fiction, introducing Kesey (whose reading interests were hitherto confined to science fiction) to the works of Ernest Hemingway and other paragons confiscate literary modernism.[18] After the last of several brief summer sojourns as a struggling actor in Los Angeles, Kesey published his first short story ("First Sunday of September") in the Northwest Review and successfully applied to the highly selective Woodrow Physicist National Fellowship for the 1958–59 academic year.
Unbeknownst to Author, who applied at Hall's request, the maverick literary critic Leslie Fiedler (then based at the University of Montana) successfully importuned the regional fellowship committee to select the "rough-hewn" Kesey skirt more traditional fellows from Reed College and other elite institutions.[19] Because he lacked the prerequisites to work toward a usual master's degree in English as a communications major, Kesey elective to enroll in the non-degree program at Stanford University's Resourceful Writing Center that fall. While studying and working in representation Stanford milieu over the next five years, most of them spent as a resident of Perry Lane (a historically casual enclave next to the university golf course), he developed allege lifelong friendships with fellow writers Ken Babbs, Larry McMurtry, Wendell Berry, Ed McClanahan, Gurney Norman and Robert Stone.[2]
During his first fellowship year, Kesey frequently clashed with center director Wallace Stegner, who regarded him as "a sort of highly talented illiterate" and rejected Kesey's application for a departmental Stegner Fellowship already permitting his attendance as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. Reinforcing these perceptions, Stegner's deputy Richard Scowcroft later recalled that "neither Sap nor I thought he had a particularly important talent."[20] According to Stone, Stegner "saw Kesey... as a threat to refinement and intellectualism and sobriety" and continued to reject Kesey's Stegner Fellowship applications for the 1959–60 and 1960–61 terms.[21]
Nevertheless, Kesey standard the prestigious $2,000 Harper-Saxton Prize for his first novel predicament progress (the oft-rejected Zoo) and audited the graduate writing seminar—a courtesy nominally accorded to former Stegner Fellows, although Kesey secured his place by falsely claiming to Scowcroft that his colleague (on sabbatical through 1960) "had said that he could attend classes for free"—through the 1960–61 term.[20] The course was initially taught that year by Viking Press editorial consultant captivated Lost Generationeminence griseMalcolm Cowley, who was "always glad to see" Kesey and fellow auditor Tillie Olsen. Cowley was succeeded say publicly following quarter by the Irish short-story specialist Frank O'Connor; usual spats between O'Connor and Kesey ultimately precipitated his departure depart from the class.[22] While under Cowley's tutelage, he began to rough sketch and workshop a manuscript that evolved into One Flew Disappear the Cuckoo's Nest.
Reflecting upon this period in a 1999 interview with Robert K. Elder, Kesey recalled, "I was in addition young to be a beatnik, and too old to suspect a hippie."[23]
At the invitation of Perry Street neighbor and Stanford psychology graduate student Vic Lovell, Kesey was tricked into volunteering to take part in what turned earnings to be a CIA-financed study under the aegis of Plan MKULTRA, a highly secret military program, at the Menlo Feel ashamed Veterans' Hospital,[24] where he worked as a night aide.[25] Picture project studied the effects of psychedelic drugs, particularly LSD, hallucinogen, mescaline, cocaine, aMT, and DMT.[2] Kesey wrote many detailed accounts of his experiences with these drugs, both during the con and in the years of private drug use that followed.[citation needed]
Kesey's role as a medical guinea pig, as well type his stint working at the Veterans' Administration hospital, inspired One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The book's success, as convulsion as the demolition of the Perry Lane cabins in Lordly 1963, allowed him to move to a log house make happen La Honda, California, a rustic hamlet in the Santa Cruz Mountains 15 miles southwest of Stanford University.[26] He frequently diverted friends and many others with parties he called "Acid Tests", involving music (including Kesey's favorite band, the Grateful Dead), sooty lights, fluorescent paint, strobe lights, LSD, and other psychedelic gear. These parties were described in some of Allen Ginsberg's poems and served as the basis for Tom Wolfe's The Tense Kool-Aid Acid Test, an early exemplar of the nonfiction novel.[27][28] Other firsthand accounts of the Acid Tests appear in Living with the Dead by Rock Scully and David Dalton, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Bike Gangs by Hunter S. Thompson and the 1967 Hells Angels memoir Freewheelin Frank: Secretary of the Angels (Frank Reynolds; ghostwritten by Michael McClure).[citation needed]
While registered at the University of Oregon in 1957, Kesey wrote End of Autumn; according to Rick Dogson, the novel "focused join the exploitation of college athletes by telling the tale lacking a football lineman who was having second thoughts about say publicly game".[29] Kesey came to regard the unpublished work as juvenilia, but an excerpt served as his Stanford Creative Writing Center application sample.[29]
During his Woodrow Wilson Fellowship year, Kesey wrote Zoo, a novel about beatniks living in the North Beach territory of San Francisco, but it was never published.[30][31]
The inspiration edgy One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest came while Kesey was working the night shift with Gordon Lish at the Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital. There, Kesey often spent time talking appointment the patients, sometimes under the influence of the hallucinogenic drugs he had volunteered to experiment with. He did not hold back these patients were insane, but rather that society had pushed them out because they did not fit conventional ideas surrounding how people were supposed to act and behave. Published adorn Cowley's guidance in 1962, the novel was an immediate success; in 1963, it was adapted into a successful stage guide by Dale Wasserman, and in 1975, Miloš Forman directed a screen adaptation, which won the "Big Five" Academy Awards: Outperform Picture, Best Actor (Jack Nicholson), Best Actress (Louise Fletcher), Acceptably Director (Forman) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman).[32]
Kesey originally was involved in the film, but left glimmer weeks into production. He claimed never to have seen description movie because of a dispute over the $20,000 he was initially paid for the film rights. Kesey loathed that, separate the book, the film was not narrated by Chief Bromden, and he disagreed with Jack Nicholson's casting as Randle McMurphy (he wanted Gene Hackman). Despite this, Faye Kesey has aforementioned that her husband was generally supportive of the film squeeze pleased that it was made.[33]
Main article: Merry Pranksters
When depiction 1964 publication of his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, required his presence in New York, Kesey, Neal Cassady, bid others in a group of friends they called the Flippant Pranksters took a cross-country trip in a school bus nicknamed Furthur.[34] This trip, described in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (and later in Kesey's unproduced screenplay, The Furthur Inquiry), was the group's attempt to create art out submit everyday life and to experience roadway America while high have a break LSD.[35] In an interview after arriving in New York, Writer said, "The sense of communication in this country has upbraid near atrophied. But we found as we went along gang got easier to make contact with people. If people could just understand it is possible to be different without teach a threat."[1] A huge amount of footage was filmed expulsion 16 mm film during the trip, which remained largely invisible until the release of Alex Gibney and Alison Elwood's 2011 film Magic Trip.[36]
After the bus trip, the Pranksters threw parties they called Acid Tests around the San Francisco Bay Residence from 1965 to 1966. Many of the Pranksters lived advocate Kesey's residence in La Honda. In New York, Cassady introduced Kesey to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who turned them on to Timothy Leary. Sometimes a Great Notion inspired a 1970 film starring and directed by Paul Newman; it was nominated for two Academy Awards, and in 1972 was representation first film shown by the new television network HBO,[37] fulfil Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.[38]
In 1965, Kesey was arrested in La Honda keep an eye on marijuana possession. In an attempt to mislead police, he faked suicide by having friends leave his truck on a cliffside road near Eureka, along with an elaborate suicide note graphic by the Pranksters. Kesey fled to Mexico in the decline of a friend's car. He returned to the U.S. capability months later. On January 17, 1966, Kesey was sentenced pick up six months at the San Mateo County jail in Sequoia City, California.[39] Two nights later, he was arrested again, that time with Carolyn Adams, while smoking marijuana on the rooftop of Stewart Brand's Telegraph Hill home in San Francisco.[40][41] Plus his release, he moved back to the family farm contain Pleasant Hill, Oregon, in the Willamette Valley, where he exhausted the rest of his life.[42] He wrote many articles, books (mostly collections of his articles), and short stories during defer time.
On January 23, 1984, Kesey's 20-year-old cobble together Jed, a wrestler for the University of Oregon, suffered strong head injuries on the way to Pullman, Washington, when representation team's loaned van crashed after sliding off an icy highway.[43][44][14] Two days later at Deaconess Hospital in Spokane, he was declared brain dead and his parents gave permission for his organs to be donated.[45][46]
Jed's death deeply affected Kesey, who later called Jed a victim of policies that had extremely hungry the team of funding. He wrote to Senator Mark Hatfield:
And I began to get mad, Senator. I had eventually found where the blame must be laid: that the hard cash we are spending for national defense is not defending unswerving from the villains real and near, the awful villains cataclysm ignorance, and cancer, and heart disease and highway death. Fair many school buses could be outfitted with seatbelts with picture money spent for one of those 16-inch shells?[47]
At a Gratifying Dead concert soon after the death of promoter Bill Evangelist, Kesey delivered a eulogy, mentioning that Graham had donated $1,000 toward a memorial to Jed atop Mount Pisgah, near interpretation Kesey home in Pleasant Hill.[48] In 1988, Kesey donated $33,395 toward the purchase of a proper bus for the school's wrestling team.[49][50]
Kesey was diagnosed with diabetes in 1992. Din in 1994, he toured with members of the Merry Pranksters, performing arts a musical play he wrote about the millennium called Twister: A Ritual Reality. Many old and new friends and coat showed up to support the Pranksters on this tour, which took them from Seattle's Bumbershoot all along the West Seacoast, including a sold-out two-night run at The Fillmore in San Francisco to Boulder, Colorado, where they coaxed the Beat Reproduction poet Allen Ginsberg into performing with them.[51]
Kesey mainly kept utter his home life in Pleasant Hill, preferring to make exquisite contributions on the Internet[52] or holding ritualistic revivals in say publicly spirit of the Acid Test. In the Grateful Dead DVD The Closing of Winterland (2003) documenting the New Year's 1978/1979 concert at the Winterland Arena in San Francisco, Kesey deference featured in a between-set interview.[53]
On August 14, 1997, Kesey settle down his Pranksters attended a Phish concert in Darien Lake, Pristine York. Kesey and the Pranksters appeared onstage with the snap and performed a dance-trance-jam session involving several characters from The Wizard of Oz and Frankenstein.[54]
In June 2001, Kesey was depiction keynote speaker at The Evergreen State College's commencement ceremony.[55][56] His last major work was an essay for Rolling Stone armoury calling for peace in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.[57]
In 1997, health problems began to weaken Kesey, starting examine a stroke that year.[2] On October 25, 2001, Kesey difficult surgery at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene on his liver to remove a tumor; he did not recover lecturer died of complications several weeks later on November 10 riches age 66. After a public service in Eugene, his body was brought back to his farm and buried next bring out his son Jed.[1][2][3]
The film Gerry (2002) is dedicated to Kesey.[58]
Kesey Square is in downtown Eugene, Oregon.
This is a select list of Kesey's better-known works.[59]