Ken Elton Kesey (/ˈkiːziː/; September 17, 1935 – November 10, 2001) was an American novelist, essayist andcountercultural figure. He considered himself a link between theBeat Generation of the 1950s and thehippies of the 1960s.
AfterOne Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was published, Kesey moved to nearbyLa Honda, California, and began hosting "happenings" with former colleagues from Stanford, bohemian and literary figures includingNeal Cassady and other friends, who became collectively known as theMerry Pranksters. As documented inTom Wolfe's 1968New Journalism bookThe Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, some of the parties were promoted to the public asAcid Tests, and integrated the consumption ofLSD with multimedia performances. He mentored theGrateful 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 themodernist grandeur ofWilliam Faulkner'sYoknapatawpha saga, Kesey regarded it as his magnum opus.[6]
In 1965, after being arrested formarijuana possession and faking suicide, Kesey was imprisoned for five months. Shortly thereafter, he returned home to theWillamette Valley and settled inPleasant Hill, Oregon, where he maintained a secluded, family-oriented lifestyle for the rest of his life. In addition to teaching at the University of Oregon—an experience that culminated inCaverns (1989), a collaborative novel by Kesey and his graduate workshop students under the pseudonym "O.U. Levon"—he continued to regularly contribute fiction and reportage to such publications asEsquire,Rolling Stone,Oui,Running, andThe Whole Earth Catalog; various iterations of these pieces were collected inKesey's Garage Sale (1973) andDemon Box (1986).
Between 1974 and 1980, Kesey published six issues ofSpit in the Ocean, aliterary magazine that featured excerpts from an unfinished novel (Seven Prayers by Grandma Whittier, an account of Kesey's grandmother's struggle withAlzheimer's disease) and contributions from writers includingMargo St. James,Kate Millett,Stewart Brand,Saul-Paul Sirag,Jack Sarfatti,Paul Krassner andWilliam S. Burroughs.[7][8] After a third novel (Sailor Song) was released to lukewarm reviews in 1992, he reunited with the Merry Pranksters and began publishing works on the Internet until ill health (including a stroke) curtailed his activities.
Kesey was born in 1935 inLa Junta, Colorado, to dairy farmers Geneva (née Smith) and Frederick A. Kesey.[1] When Kesey was 10 years old, the family moved toSpringfield, Oregon in 1946.[2] Kesey was a championwrestler in high school and college in the 174-pound (79 kg) weight division, and almost qualified to be on theOlympic team, but a serious shoulder injury halted his wrestling career. He graduated fromSpringfield High School in 1953.[2] An avid reader and filmgoer, the young Kesey tookJohn Wayne,Edgar Rice Burroughs, andZane Grey as his role models (later naming a son Zane) and toyed withmagic,ventriloquism andhypnotism.[9]
While attending theUniversity of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication in neighboringEugene in 1956, Kesey eloped with his high-school sweetheart,Oregon State College student Norma "Faye" Haxby, whom he had met in seventh grade.[2] According to Kesey, "Without Faye, I would have been swept overboard by notoriety and weird, dope-fueled ideas and flower-child girls with beamy eyes and bulbous breasts."[10] Married until his death, they had three children: Jed, Zane and Shannon.[11] Additionally, with Faye's approval, Kesey fathered a daughter, Sunshine Kesey, with fellowMerry 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 the University of Oregon wrestling team as a better fit for his build. After posting a .885 winning percentage in the 1956–57 season, he received the Fred Low Scholarship for outstanding Northwest wrestler. In 1957, Kesey was second in his weight class at the Pacific Coast intercollegiate competition.[1][13][14] He remains in the top 10 of Oregon Wrestling's all-time winning percentage.[15][16]
A member ofBeta Theta Pi throughout his studies, Kesey graduated from the University of Oregon with aB.A. in speech and communication in 1957. Increasingly disengaged by the playwriting and screenwriting courses that comprised much of his major, he began to take literature classes in the second half of his collegiate career with James B. Hall, a cosmopolitan alumnus of theIowa Writers' Workshop who had previously taught atCornell University and later served as provost of College V at theUniversity of California, Santa Cruz.[17] Hall took on Kesey as his protégé and cultivated his interest in literary fiction, introducing Kesey (whose reading interests were hitherto confined toscience fiction) to the works ofErnest Hemingway and other paragons ofliterary modernism.[18] After the last of several brief summer sojourns as a struggling actor inLos Angeles, Kesey published his first short story ("First Sunday of September") in theNorthwest Review and successfully applied to the highly selectiveWoodrow Wilson National Fellowship for the 1958–59 academic year.
Unbeknownst to Kesey, who applied at Hall's request, the maverick literary criticLeslie Fiedler (then based at theUniversity of Montana) successfully importuned the regional fellowship committee to select the "rough-hewn" Kesey alongside more traditional fellows fromReed College and other elite institutions.[19] Because he lacked the prerequisites to work toward a traditional master's degree in English as a communications major, Kesey elected to enroll in the non-degree program atStanford University's Creative Writing Center that fall. While studying and working in the Stanford milieu over the next five years, most of them spent as a resident of Perry Lane (a historically bohemian enclave next to the university golf course), he developed intimate lifelong friendships with fellow writersKen Babbs,Larry McMurtry,Wendell Berry,Ed McClanahan,Gurney Norman andRobert Stone.[2]
During his initial fellowship year, Kesey frequently clashed with center directorWallace Stegner, who regarded him as "a sort of highly talented illiterate" and rejected Kesey's application for a departmentalStegner Fellowship before permitting his attendance as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. Reinforcing these perceptions, Stegner's deputyRichard Scowcroft later recalled that "neither Wally nor I thought he had a particularly important talent."[20] According to Stone, Stegner "saw Kesey... as a threat to civilization and intellectualism and sobriety" and continued to reject Kesey's Stegner Fellowship applications for the 1959–60 and 1960–61 terms.[21]
Nevertheless, Kesey received the prestigious $2,000 Harper-Saxton Prize for his first novel in progress (the oft-rejectedZoo) and audited the graduate writing seminar—a courtesy nominally accorded to former Stegner Fellows, although Kesey only 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 byViking Press editorial consultant andLost Generationeminence griseMalcolm Cowley, who was "always glad to see" Kesey and fellow auditorTillie Olsen. Cowley was succeeded the following quarter by the Irish short-story specialistFrank O'Connor; frequent spats between O'Connor and Kesey ultimately precipitated his departure from the class.[22] While under Cowley's tutelage, he began to draft and workshop a manuscript that evolved intoOne Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Reflecting upon this period in a 1999 interview withRobert K. Elder, Kesey recalled, "I was too young to be abeatnik, and too old to be a hippie."[23]
At the invitation of Perry Lane neighbor and Stanford psychology graduate student Vic Lovell, Kesey was tricked into volunteering to take part in what turned out to be aCIA-financed study under the aegis ofProject MKULTRA, a highly secret military program, at theMenlo Park Veterans' Hospital,[24] where he worked as a night aide.[25] The project studied the effects ofpsychedelic drugs, particularlyLSD,psilocybin,mescaline,cocaine,aMT, andDMT.[2] Kesey wrote many detailed accounts of his experiences with these drugs, both during the study and in the years of private drug use that followed.[citation needed]
While enrolled at the University of Oregon in 1957, Kesey wroteEnd of Autumn; according to Rick Dogson, the novel "focused on the exploitation of college athletes by telling the tale of a football lineman who was having second thoughts about the 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 wroteZoo, a novel about beatniks living in theNorth Beach community ofSan Francisco, but it was never published.[30][31]
The inspiration forOne Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest came while Kesey was working the night shift withGordon Lish at theMenlo Park Veterans' Hospital. There, Kesey often spent time talking to the patients, sometimes under the influence of the hallucinogenic drugs he had volunteered to experiment with. He did not believe these patients were insane, but rather that society had pushed them out because they did not fit conventional ideas of how people were supposed to act and behave. Published under Cowley's guidance in 1962, the novel was an immediate success; in 1963, it was adapted into a successfulstage play byDale Wasserman, and in 1975,Miloš Forman directed ascreen adaptation, which won the "Big Five" Academy Awards:Best Picture,Best Actor (Jack Nicholson),Best Actress (Louise Fletcher),Best Director (Forman) andBest Adapted Screenplay (Lawrence Hauben andBo Goldman).[32]
Kesey originally was involved in the film, but left two weeks into production. He claimed never to have seen the movie because of a dispute over the $20,000 he was initially paid for the film rights. Kesey loathed that, unlike the book, the film was not narrated by Chief Bromden, and he disagreed withJack Nicholson's casting as Randle McMurphy (he wantedGene Hackman). Despite this, Faye Kesey has said that her husband was generally supportive of the film and pleased that it was made.[33]
When the 1964 publication of his second novel,Sometimes a Great Notion, 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 ina school bus nicknamedFurthur.[34] This trip, described in Tom Wolfe'sThe Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (and later in Kesey's unproduced screenplay,The Furthur Inquiry), was the group's attempt to create art out of everyday life and to experience roadway America while high on LSD.[35] In an interview after arriving in New York, Kesey said, "The sense of communication in this country has damn near atrophied. But we found as we went along it got easier to make contact with people. If people could just understand it is possible to be different without being a threat."[1] A huge amount of footage was filmed on16 mm film during the trip, which remained largely unseen until the release ofAlex Gibney andAlison Elwood's 2011 filmMagic Trip.[36]
After the bus trip, the Pranksters threw parties they called Acid Tests around the San Francisco Bay Area from 1965 to 1966. Many of the Pranksters lived at Kesey's residence in La Honda. In New York, Cassady introduced Kesey toJack Kerouac andAllen Ginsberg, who turned them on toTimothy Leary.Sometimes a Great Notion inspired a 1970 film starring and directed byPaul Newman; it was nominated for twoAcademy Awards, and in 1972 was the first film shown by the new television networkHBO,[37] inWilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.[38]
In 1965, Kesey was arrested in La Honda formarijuana possession. In an attempt to mislead police, he faked suicide by having friends leave his truck on a cliffside road nearEureka, along with an elaborate suicide note written by the Pranksters. Kesey fled to Mexico in the back of a friend's car. He returned to the U.S. eight months later. On January 17, 1966, Kesey was sentenced to six months at the San Mateo County jail inRedwood City, California.[39] Two nights later, he was arrested again, this time with Carolyn Adams, while smoking marijuana on the rooftop ofStewart Brand'sTelegraph Hill home in San Francisco.[40][41] On his release, he moved back to the family farm inPleasant Hill, Oregon, in theWillamette Valley, where he spent the rest of his life.[42] He wrote many articles, books (mostly collections of his articles), and short stories during that time.
On January 23, 1984, Kesey's 20-year-old son Jed, a wrestler for theUniversity of Oregon, suffered severe head injuries on the way toPullman, Washington, when the team's loaned van crashed after sliding off an icy highway.[43][44][14] Two days later atDeaconess Hospital inSpokane, 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 starved the team of funding. He wrote to SenatorMark Hatfield:
And I began to get mad, Senator. I had finally found where the blame must be laid: that the money we are spending for national defense is not defending us from the villains real and near, the awful villains of ignorance, and cancer, and heart disease and highway death. How many school buses could be outfitted with seatbelts with the money spent for one of those 16-inch shells?[47]
At a Grateful Dead concert soon after the death of promoterBill Graham, Kesey delivered a eulogy, mentioning that Graham had donated $1,000 toward a memorial to Jed atopMount Pisgah, near the Kesey home inPleasant 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 withdiabetes in 1992. In 1994, he toured with members of the Merry Pranksters, performing a musical play he wrote about the millennium calledTwister: A Ritual Reality. Many old and new friends and family showed up to support the Pranksters on this tour, which took them from Seattle'sBumbershoot all along the West Coast, including a sold-out two-night run atThe Fillmore inSan Francisco toBoulder, Colorado, where they coaxed the Beat Generation poetAllen Ginsberg into performing with them.[51]
Kesey mainly kept to his home life inPleasant Hill, preferring to make artistic contributions on the Internet[52] or holding ritualistic revivals in the spirit of the Acid Test. In the Grateful Dead DVDThe Closing of Winterland (2003) documenting the New Year's 1978/1979 concert at theWinterland Arena in San Francisco, Kesey is featured in a between-set interview.[53]
On August 14, 1997, Kesey and his Pranksters attended aPhish concert inDarien Lake, New York. Kesey and the Pranksters appeared onstage with the band and performed a dance-trance-jam session involving several characters fromThe Wizard of Oz andFrankenstein.[54]
In 1997, health problems began to weaken Kesey, starting with astroke that year.[2] On October 25, 2001, Kesey had surgery atSacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene on his liver to remove atumor; he did not recover and died of complications several weeks later on November 10 at age 66. After a public service in Eugene, his body was brought back to his farm and buried next to his son Jed.[1][2][3]
Levon, O. U. (1990).Caverns : a novel. Introduction by Ken Kesey. New York: Penguin Books.ISBN978-0-14-012208-4.OCLC20131987. "O.U. Levon" spelled backwards produces "novel U.O" This book was jointly written by a creative writing class taught by Kesey at the University of Oregon (U.O.).
Kesey, Ken (2003).Kesey's Jail Journal : Cut the M************ Loose. Introduction byEd McClanahan. New York: Viking.ISBN978-0-670-87693-8.OCLC52134654. An expansion of the 1967 journals that Kesey kept while incarcerated
^ab"Crash takes second life".Spokesman-Review. (Spokane, Washington). January 24, 1984. p. A6.Writer's son, Oregon wrestler Jed Kesey, dies of injuries
^"Top Wrestlers". Eugene, OR: Save Oregon Wrestling Foundation. Archived fromthe original on December 14, 2014. RetrievedDecember 14, 2014.
^Leighton, Ken (July 8, 1994)."Merry pranksters Jambay trip back to San Diego beach".The Californian. p. 62. RetrievedAugust 17, 2020.On Sunday "Twister" played in Boulder, Colorado. The night was especially groovy for proto-and neo-hippys, as Allan Ginsberg celebrated his 70th birthday by appearing in the play with Kesey, the Pranksters and Jambay.
^"Intrepid Trips".intrepidtrips.com. May 15, 2001. Archived fromthe original on May 15, 2001. RetrievedAugust 17, 2020.
M. Gilbert Porter,The Art of Grit: Ken Kesey's Fiction. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1982.
Elaine B Safer,The contemporary American Comic Epic: The Novels of Barth, Pynchon, Gaddis, and Kesey. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1988.
Peter Swirski, "You're Not in Canada until You Can Hear the Loons Crying; or, Voting, People's Power and Ken Kesey'sOne Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest," in Swirski,American Utopia and Social Engineering in Literature, Social Thought, and Political History. New York: Routledge, 2011.
Stephen L. Tanner,Ken Kesey. Boston, MA: Twayne, 1983.
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