Everything about Ken Kesey totally explained
Kenneth Elton Kesey (
September 17,
1935 –
November 10,
2001) was an
American author, best known for his debut novel,,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and as a counter-cultural figure who, some consider, was a link between the
Beat Generation of the 1950s and the
hippies of the 1960s. "I was too young to be a
beatnik, and too old to be a hippie," Kesey said in a 1999 interview with
Robert K. Elder.
Early life
Ken Kesey was born in
La Junta, Colorado to Frederick A. Kesey and Geneva Smith Kesey. Later he moved with his family to
Eugene, Oregon. A champion
wrestler in both high school and college, he eloped with his high-school sweetheart, Norma "Faye" Haxby, between high school graduation and starting college at the
University of Oregon. They had three children, Jed, Zane, and Shannon. Kesey had another child, Sunshine, in 1966 with fellow
Merry Prankster Carolyn Adams. Kesey attended the
University of Oregon's School of Journalism, where he received a degree in speech and communication in 1957, where he was also a brother of
Beta Theta Pi. He was awarded a
Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship in 1958 to enroll in the creative writing program at
Stanford University, which he did the following year. While at Stanford, he studied under
Wallace Stegner and began the manuscript that would become
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Experimentation with psychoactive drugs
At Stanford in 1959, Kesey volunteered to take part in a CIA-financed study named
Project MKULTRA at the
Menlo Park Veterans Hospital on the effects of
psychoactive drugs, particularly
LSD,
psilocybin,
mescaline,
cocaine, and
DMT. Kesey wrote many detailed accounts of his experiences with these drugs, both during the
Project MKULTRA study and in the years of private experimentation that followed. His role as a medical
guinea pig inspired Kesey to write
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1962. The success of this book, as well as the sale of his residence at Stanford, allowed him to move to
La Honda, California, in the mountains south of
San Francisco. He frequently entertained friends and many others with parties he called "
Acid Tests" involving music (such as Kesey's favorite band, The Warlocks, later known as the
Grateful Dead),
black lights, fluorescent paint,
strobes and other "
psychedelic" effects, and, of course, LSD. These parties were noted in some of
Allen Ginsberg's poems and are also described in
Tom Wolfe's
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, as well as by
Hunter S. Thompson and
Freewheelin Frank, Secretary of the Hell's Angels by Frank Reynolds. Ken Kesey was also said to have experimented with LSD with Ringo Starr in 1965 and in fact influenced the set up for their future performances in the UK.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
In 1959, Kesey wrote a novel called
Zoo, which was about the
beatniks in
San Francisco. The novel was never published. However, Kesey started writing another novel,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The inspiration for Kesey's second novel came from his work at the
Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital on the night shift. There, Kesey often spent time talking to the patients, sometimes under the influence of the hallucinogenic drugs with which he'd volunteered to experiment. Kesey believed that these patients were not
insane, but that society had pushed them out because they didn't fit the conventional ideas of how people were supposed to act and behave.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was an immediate success. It was later adapted into a successful stage play by Dale Wasserman;
Miloš Forman directed a screen adaptation in 1975.
The film starred
Jack Nicholson and won the "Big Five" Academy Awards:
Academy Award for Best Picture,
Academy Award for Best Actor (Nicholson),
Academy Award for Best Actress (
Louise Fletcher),
Academy Award for Best Director (Forman) and the
Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay (Lawrence Hauben, Bo Goldman). Kesey, who was originally involved in creating the film, left two weeks into production. He claimed to have never seen the movie because of a dispute over the $20,000 he was initially paid for the film rights. Kesey loathed the fact that the film wasn't narrated, as the book was, by the character Chief Bromden, and disagreed with the casting of Jack Nicholson as Randle McMurphy (he wanted
Gene Hackman). Despite this, Faye Kesey has stated that he was generally supportive of the film and pleased that it was made.
Merry Pranksters
When the publication of his second novel,
Sometimes a Great Notion, in 1964 required his presence in New York, Kesey,
Neal Cassady, and others in a group of friends they called the "
Merry Pranksters" took a cross-country trip in a school bus nicknamed "
Furthur." This trip, described in Tom Wolfe's
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (and later in Kesey's own screenplay "The Further Inquiry") was the group's attempt to create art out of everyday life. In New York, Cassady introduced Kesey to
Jack Kerouac and to Allen Ginsberg, who in turn introduced them to
Timothy Leary.
Sometimes a Great Notion was made into a 1971 film starring
Paul Newman, which was nominated for two
Academy Awards, and in 1972 was the first film shown by the new
television network HBO, in
Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.-
Legal trouble
Kesey was arrested for possession of
marijuana in 1965. In an attempt to mislead police, he faked his own suicide by having friends leave his truck on a cliffside road near
Eureka, along with a suicide note that said, "Ocean, Ocean I'll beat you in the end." Kesey fled to
Mexico in the back of a friend's car. When he returned to the
United States eight months later, Kesey was arrested and sent to the San Mateo County jail in
Redwood City, California for five months. On his release, he moved back to the family farm in
Pleasant Hill, Oregon in the
Willamette Valley, where he spent the rest of his life. He wrote many articles, books (mostly collections of his articles), and short stories during that time.
Twister
In 1994 he toured with members of the Merry Pranksters performing a musical play he wrote about the millennium called
Twister: A Ritual Reality. Many old and new friends and family showed up to support the Pranksters on this tour that took them from Seattle's
Bumbershoot, all along the West Coast including a sold out two-night run at
The Fillmore in
San Francisco to
Boulder, Colorado, where they coaxed (or pranked) the Beat Generation poet
Allen Ginsberg into performing with them. Kesey, always a friend to musicians since his days of the Acid Test, enlisted the band Jambay, one of the original bands of the
jam band genre, to be his "pit orchestra." Jambay played an acoustic set before each
Twister performance and an electric set after each show. While the show was critically panned, Kesey was still pushing the boundaries of performance art that included large scale multi-media, music, and audience participation.
Final years
Kesey mainly kept to his home life in Pleasant Hill, preferring to make artistic contributions on the Internet, or holding ritualistic revivals in the spirit of the Acid Test. He occasionally made appearances at rock concerts and festivals, bringing the second bus "Furthur2" and various Pranksters with him. In the official Grateful Dead DVD release "The Closing of Winterland" (2003), which documents the monumental New Year's '78 concert, Kesey is featured in a between-set interview. More notably, he appeared at the Hog Farm Family Pig-Nic Festival (organized by
Woodstock MC Wavy Gravy, in
Laytonville, California), where they mock-
canonized a very ill but still quite aware Dr. Timothy Leary atop "Further2". He also performed on stage with Jambay at the Pig-Nic, playing a few songs from
Twister with members of the original cast.
In 1984, Kesey's son Jed, a wrestler for the University of Oregon, was killed on the way to a wrestling tournament when the team's bald-tired van crashed. This deeply affected Kesey, who later said Jed was a victim of conservative, anti-government policy that starved the team of proper funding. There is a memorial dedicated to Jed on the top of
Mount Pisgah, which is near the Keseys' home in Pleasant Hill. In a Grateful Dead Halloween concert just days after
Bill Graham died in a helicopter crash, Kesey appeared on stage in a tuxedo to deliver a eulogy, mentioning that Graham had paid for Jed's mountain-top memorial.
His last major work was an essay for
Rolling Stone magazine calling for peace in the aftermath of the
September 11, 2001 attacks.
Kesey died on
November 10,
2001, following an operation for
liver cancer.
Bibliography
Some of Kesey's better-known works include:
Movies made about Ken Kesey
Neal Cassady, starring Tate Donovan as Cassady, and Chris Bauer as Kesey.Further Information
Get more info on 'Ken Kesey'.
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