One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

Kesey's next novel, Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), appeared two years later and was also made into a film, this time directed by Paul Newman. He did not like Jack Nicholson, or the script, and sued the producers. When the film won five Academy Awards, Kesey was barely mentioned during the award ceremonies, and he made known his unhappiness with the film. The film adaptation of the book gained a huge success. Into his world enters the petty criminal and prankster Randall Patrick McMurphy with his efforts to change the bureaucratic system of the institution, ruled by Nurse Ratched.

Burroughs ( Naked Lunch, 1959), Kesey took peyote. While writing the work, and continuing in the footsteps of such writers as Thomas De Quincy ( Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 1821), Aldous Huxley ( The Doors of Perception, 1954), and William S. These experiences as a part-time aide at a psychiatric hospital, LSD sessions - and a vision of an Indian sweeping there the floor - formed the background for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, set in a mental hospital. In California Kesey's friends served LSD-laced Kool-Aid to members of their parties.Īt a Veterans' Administration hospital in Menlo Park, California, Kesey was paid as a volunteer experimental subject, taking mind-altering drugs and reporting their effects. Their bus, called Furthur, was painted in Day-Glo colors. Tom Wolfe described in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) Kesey and his friends, called the Merry Pranksters, as they traveled the country and used various hallucinogens. His first work was an unpublished novel, ZOO, about the beatniks of the North Beach community in San Francisco. Kesey attended a creative writing course taught by the novelist Wallace Stegner. In 1956 he married his school sweetheart, Faye Haxby. Kesey soon dropped out, joined the counterculture movement, and began experimenting with drugs. On graduating he won a scholarship to Stanford University. He studied at the University of Oregon, where he acted in college plays. He spent his early years hunting, fishing, swimming he learned to box and wrestle, and he was a star football player. Ken Kesey was born in La Junta, CO, and brought up in Eugene, OR. Kesey has been called the Pied Piper, who changed the beat generation into the hippie movement. In the 1960s, Kesey became a counterculture hero and a guru of psychedelic drugs with Timothy Leary. Ken Kesey was American writer, who gained world fame with his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962, filmed 1975).

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey