KEN KESEY

'Kenneth Elton Kesey' (September 17, 1935 – November 10, 2001) was an American author, best known for his 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.

Contents

Early life

Experimentation with psychoactive drugs

''One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest''

Merry Pranksters

Later life

''Twister''

Final years

List of major works

Movies made about Ken Kesey

Notes

References

External links

Early life

Ken Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado to Edward and Dulce Kesey. Later he moved with his family to Springfield, Oregon. A champion wrestler in both high school and college, he eloped with his high-school sweetheart, Faye Haxby, between high school graduation and starting college at Oregon. They had three children, Jed, Zane, and Shannon. Kesey had another child, Sunshine, in 1966 with fellow Merry Prankster Carolyn Adams. Kesey's friends gather in tribute Kesey attended the University of Oregon's School of Journalism, where he received a degree in speech and communication in 1957. 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, 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.

''One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest''

The inspiration for Kesey's first novel, ''One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,'' 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 had volunteered to experiment. Kesey believed that these patients were not insane, but that society had pushed them out because they did not 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), 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 was not 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" or ''Further''. [1] 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. (In 1972, ''Sometimes a Great Notion'' was the first film shown in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania on a new television network called HBO.)

Later life

Kesey was arrested for possession of marijuana in 1966. In an attempt to mislead police, he faked his own suicide by having friends leave the Merry Pranksters' 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 later returned to the United States, Kesey was arrested and sent to jail for five months. On his release, he moved back to the family farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon in the Willamette Valley, where he was to spend 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 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, Oregon, 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 the pranksters with him. Most notably, he appeared at the Hog Farm in Laytonville, California for Woodstock M.C. Wavy Gravy's Hog Farm Family Pig-Nic Festival, where atop "Further2," they canonized a very ill, but still quite aware Dr. Timothy Leary. 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 in a van crash on the way to a wrestling tournament. It deeply affected Kesey, who later said Jed was a victim of conservative, anti-government policy that starved the team of proper funding. The tires of the van were bald. There is a memorial dedicated to Jed on the top of Mount Pisgah, which is near the Keseys' home in Pleasant Hill.
In 1997, Kesey and the Merry Pranksters appeared at a Phish concert during a performance of the song "Colonel Forbin's Ascent."
His last major work was an essay for ''Rolling Stone'' magazine calling for peace after 9-11.
Kesey died on November 10, 2001 following an operation for liver cancer.

List of major works

★ ''One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest''. New York: Viking. 1962.

★ ''Sometimes a Great Notion''. New York: Viking. 1964.

★ ''Genesis West'' volume five was published in the Fall of 1963 as a celebration of Ken Kesey. This volume includes works by Ken and interview of Ken by Gordon Lish.

★ ''Kesey's Garage Sale''. New York: Viking. 1972.

★ ''Northwest Review Book: Kesey'', collection of notes, manuscripts and drawings originally published in 1977, reissued 2001 by University of Oregon Press.

★ ''Demon Box''. New York: Penguin. 1986.

★ ''Caverns''. New York: Penguin. 1990.

★ ''The Further Inquiry'' (screenplay). New York: Viking. 1990.

★ ''Sailor Song''. New York: Viking, Penguin. 1992.

★ ''Last Go Round'' (with Ken Babbs). New York: Viking. 1994.

★ ''Twister'' (play). New York: Viking. 1999.

Movies made about Ken Kesey

★ ''Neal Cassady''. Starring Tate Donovan as Neal, and Chris Bauer as Kesey.

Notes

References

★ A Long Strange Trip: the Inside History of the Grateful Dead, , Dennis, McNally, Broadway Books, 2002, ISBN 0-7679-1186-5

★ Charters, Ann (ed.). ''The Portable Beat Reader''. Penguin Books. New York. 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hc); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (pbk)

External links

★ Official Website of Ken Kesey

★ Official Website of Zane Kesey

★ "Tarnished Galahad: The Prose and Pranks of Ken Kesey"

★ Remembering Ken Kesey

★ Prankster History Project

★ Never Trust a Prankster

★ Prankster Music