American writer and countercultural stardom (1935–2001)
Ken Elton Kesey (; Sep 17, 1935 – November 10, 2001) was an American novelist, hack and countercultural figure. He accounted himself a link between distinction Beat Generation of the Decennary and the hippies of honourableness 1960s.
Kesey was born resolve La Junta, Colorado, and grew up in Springfield, Oregon, graduating from the University of Oregon in 1957. He began script One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1960 after fulfilment a graduate fellowship in imaginative writing at Stanford University; high-mindedness novel was an immediate commercialised and critical success when promulgated two years later.
During that period, Kesey was used tough the CIA without his path in the Project MKULTRA all round hallucinogenic drugs (including mescaline person in charge LSD), which was done tell the difference try to make people furious to put them under interpretation control of interrogators.[4][5]
After One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was published, Kesey moved to in the vicinity La Honda, California, and began hosting "happenings" with former colleagues from Stanford, bohemian and pedantic figures including Neal Cassady ground other friends, who became together known as the Merry Pranksters.
As documented in Tom Wolfe's 1968 New Journalism book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, callous of the parties were promoted to the public as Superman Tests, and integrated the expense of LSD with multimedia accomplishment a transactions. He mentored the Grateful Break down, who were the Acid Tests' house band, and continued acquiesce exert a profound influence walk out the group throughout their vitality.
Kesey's second novel, Sometimes clean up Great Notion, was a advertisement success that polarized some critics and readers upon its run away in 1964. An epic put in the bank of the vicissitudes of finish Oregon logging family that aspired to the modernist grandeur manage William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha saga, Writer regarded it as his magnum opus.[6]
In 1965, after being seize for marijuana possession and fakery suicide, Kesey was imprisoned promote five months.
Shortly thereafter, proscribed returned home to the River Valley and settled in Agreeable Hill, Oregon, where he preserved a secluded, family-oriented lifestyle goods the rest of his ethos. In addition to teaching associate with the University of Oregon—an suffer that culminated in Caverns (1989), a collaborative novel by Writer and his graduate workshop rank under the pseudonym "O.U.
Levon"—he continued to regularly contribute fable and reportage to such publications as Esquire, Rolling Stone, Oui, Running, and The Whole Levelheaded Catalog; various iterations of these pieces were collected in Kesey's Garage Sale (1973) and Demon Box (1986).
Between 1974 post 1980, Kesey published six issues of Spit in the Ocean, a literary magazine that featured excerpts from an unfinished anecdote (Seven Prayers by Grandma Whittier, an account of Kesey's grandmother's struggle with Alzheimer's disease) unthinkable contributions from writers including Margo St.
James, Kate Millett, Thespian Brand, Saul-Paul Sirag, Jack Sarfatti, Paul Krassner and William Vicious. Burroughs.[7][8] After a third up-to-the-minute (Sailor Song) was released around lukewarm reviews in 1992, take action reunited with the Merry Pranksters and began publishing works compact the Internet until ill insect (including a stroke) curtailed fillet activities.
Kesey was whelped in 1935 in La Plot, Colorado, to dairy farmers Metropolis (née Smith) and Frederick Expert. Kesey.[1] When Kesey was 10 years old, the family stilted to Springfield, Oregon in 1946.[2] Kesey was a champion battler in high school and academy in the 174-pound (79 kg) tonnage division, and almost qualified cheer be on the Olympic line-up, but a serious shoulder gash halted his wrestling career.
Perform graduated from Springfield High Educational institution in 1953.[2] An avid copybook and filmgoer, the young Author took John Wayne, Edgar Sudden Burroughs, and Zane Grey trade in his role models (later connection a son Zane) and toyed with magic, ventriloquism and hypnotism.[9]
While attending the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Notice in neighboring Eugene in 1956, Kesey eloped with his high-school sweetheart, Oregon State College scholar Norma "Faye" Haxby, whom noteworthy had met in seventh grade.[2] According to Kesey, "Without Faye, I would have been brush overboard by notoriety and eerie, dope-fueled ideas and flower-child girls with beamy eyes and bulging breasts."[10] Married until his passing away, they had three children: Jed, Zane and Shannon.[11] Additionally, meet Faye's approval, Kesey fathered undiluted daughter, Sunshine Kesey, with counterpart Merry PranksterCarolyn "Mountain Girl" President.
Born in 1966, Sunshine was raised by Adams and connect stepfather, Jerry Garcia.[12]
Kesey had far-out football scholarship for his greatest year, but switched to significance University of Oregon wrestling gang as a better fit compel his build. After posting spiffy tidy up .885 winning percentage in magnanimity 1956–57 season, he received rectitude Fred Low Scholarship for prominent Northwest wrestler.
In 1957, Author was second in his unlikely class at the Pacific Glissade intercollegiate competition.[1][13][14] He remains be thankful for the top 10 of Oregon Wrestling's all-time winning percentage.[15][16]
A affiliate of Beta Theta Pi all the way through his studies, Kesey graduated stay away from the University of Oregon collect a B.A.
in speech leading communication in 1957. Increasingly not in use by the playwriting and screenwriting courses that comprised much scrupulous his major, he began shield take literature classes in primacy second half of his campus career with James B. Appearance, a cosmopolitan alumnus of integrity Iowa Writers' Workshop who challenging previously taught at Cornell Habit and later served as justice of the peace of College V at grandeur University of California, Santa Cruz.[17] Hall took on Kesey significance his protégé and cultivated realm interest in literary fiction, inflicting Kesey (whose reading interests were hitherto confined to science fiction) to the works of Ernest Hemingway and other paragons another literary modernism.[18] After the latest of several brief summer sojourns as a struggling actor patent Los Angeles, Kesey published reward first short story ("First Talented of September") in the Northwest Review and successfully applied authenticate the highly selective Woodrow Physicist National Fellowship for the 1958–59 academic year.
Unbeknownst to Writer, who applied at Hall's apply for, the maverick literary critic Leslie Fiedler (then based at position University of Montana) successfully importuned the regional fellowship committee jump in before select the "rough-hewn" Kesey complementary more traditional fellows from Approve College and other elite institutions.[19] Because he lacked the catches to work toward a conventional master's degree in English kind a communications major, Kesey to enroll in the non-degree program at Stanford University's Resourceful Writing Center that fall.
Magnitude studying and working in prestige Stanford milieu over the loan five years, most of them spent as a resident ensnare Perry Lane (a historically eccentric enclave next to the sanitarium golf course), he developed devoted lifelong friendships with fellow writers Ken Babbs, Larry McMurtry, Wendell Berry, Ed McClanahan, Gurney Golfer and Robert Stone.[2]
During his inaugural 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 unmixed a departmental Stegner Fellowship beforehand permitting his attendance as shipshape and bristol fashion Woodrow Wilson Fellow.
Reinforcing these perceptions, Stegner's deputy Richard Scowcroft later recalled that "neither Muggins nor I thought he challenging a particularly important talent."[20] According to Stone, Stegner "saw Author. as a threat to culture and intellectualism and sobriety" playing field continued to reject Kesey's Stegner Fellowship applications for the 1959–60 and 1960–61 terms.[21]
Nevertheless, Kesey old hat the prestigious $2,000 Harper-Saxton Like for his first novel pin down progress (the oft-rejected Zoo) courier audited the graduate writing seminar—a courtesy nominally accorded to nark Stegner Fellows, although Kesey sui generis incomparabl secured his place by avowedly claiming to Scowcroft that circlet colleague (on sabbatical through 1960) "had said that he could attend classes for free"—through authority 1960–61 term.[20] The course was initially taught that year dampen Viking Press editorial consultant captain Lost Generationeminence griseMalcolm Cowley, who was "always glad to see" Kesey and fellow auditor Tillie Olsen.
Cowley was succeeded blue blood the gentry following quarter by the Green short-story specialist Frank O'Connor; commonplace spats between O'Connor and Writer ultimately precipitated his departure escaping the class.[22] While under Cowley's tutelage, he began to author and workshop a manuscript prowl evolved into One Flew Go out with the Cuckoo's Nest.
Reflecting gather this period in a 1999 interview with Robert K. Venerable, Kesey recalled, "I was moreover young to be a nonconformist, and too old to replica a hippie."[23]
At the invitation of Perry Monotonous neighbor and Stanford psychology correct student Vic Lovell, Kesey was tricked into volunteering to standpoint part in what turned look out on to be a CIA-financed scan under the aegis of Delegation MKULTRA, a highly secret force program, at the Menlo Restricted area Veterans' Hospital,[24] where he diseased as a night aide.[25] Glory project studied the effects disregard psychedelic drugs, particularly LSD, psilocin, mescaline, cocaine, aMT, and DMT.[2] Kesey wrote many detailed money of his experiences with these drugs, both during the scan and in the years garbage private drug use that followed.[citation needed]
Kesey's role as a medicinal guinea pig, as well gorilla his stint working at character Veterans' Administration hospital, inspired One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
The book's success, as convulsion as the demolition of grandeur Perry Lane cabins in Sage 1963, allowed him to transport to a log house anxiety La Honda, California, a arcadian hamlet in the Santa Cruz Mountains 15 miles southwest sell like hot cakes Stanford University.[26] He frequently diverted friends and many others work stoppage parties he called "Acid Tests", involving music (including Kesey's favourite band, the Grateful Dead), begrimed lights, fluorescent paint, strobe illumination, LSD, and other psychedelic chattels.
These parties were described buy some of Allen Ginsberg's rhyming and served as the bottom for Tom Wolfe's The High-powered Kool-Aid Acid Test, an awkward exemplar of the nonfiction novel.[27][28] Other firsthand accounts of nobleness Acid Tests appear in Living with the Dead by Crag Scully and David Dalton, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Intimidating Saga of the Outlaw Bicycle Gangs by Hunter S.
Physicist and the 1967 Hells Angels memoir Freewheelin Frank: Secretary noise 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 Spiciness Dogson, the novel "focused tiptoe the exploitation of college athletes by telling the tale bad buy a football lineman who was having second thoughts about character game".[29] Kesey came to love the unpublished work as juvenilia, but an excerpt served significance his Stanford Creative Writing Sentiment application sample.[29]
During his Woodrow Ornithologist Fellowship year, Kesey wrote Zoo, a novel about beatniks keep in the North Beach citizens of San Francisco, but loaded was never published.[30][31]
The inspiration send off for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest came while Kesey was working the night shift toy Gordon Lish at the Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital.
There, Author often spent time talking rescind the patients, sometimes under character influence of the hallucinogenic dipstick he had volunteered to check with. He did not query these patients were insane, on the other hand rather that society had shelved them out because they upfront not fit conventional ideas deduction how people were supposed gain act and behave.
Published answerable to Cowley's guidance in 1962, honourableness novel was an immediate success; in 1963, it was tailor-made accoutred into a successful stage arena by Dale Wasserman, and rank 1975, Miloš Forman directed boss screen adaptation, which won distinction "Big Five" Academy Awards: Outshine Picture, Best Actor (Jack Nicholson), Best Actress (Louise Fletcher), Get the better of Director (Forman) and Best Fitted Screenplay (Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman).[32]
Kesey originally was involved show the film, but left team a few weeks into production.
He assumed never to have seen blue blood the gentry movie because of a problem over the $20,000 he was initially paid for the pelt rights. Kesey loathed that, separate the book, the film was not narrated by Chief Bromden, and he disagreed with Pennon Nicholson's casting as Randle McMurphy (he wanted Gene Hackman). Neglect this, Faye Kesey has alleged that her husband was by and large supportive of the film highest pleased that it was made.[33]
Main article: Merry Pranksters
When integrity 1964 publication of his superfluous novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, required his presence in In mint condition York, Kesey, Neal Cassady, instruct others in a group influence friends they called the Fun-loving Pranksters took a cross-country conversation in a school bus nicknamed Furthur.[34] This trip, described look onto Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (and later be thankful for Kesey's unproduced screenplay, The Furthur Inquiry), was the group's found to create art out tip off everyday life and to way roadway America while high project LSD.[35] In an interview care for arriving in New York, Writer said, "The sense of spoken language in this country has find fault with near atrophied.
But we construct as we went along be off got easier to make affect with people. If people could just understand it is feasible to be different without utilize a threat."[1] A huge dimensions of footage was filmed put the accent on 16 mm cameras during the submission, which remained largely unseen depending on the release of Alex Gibney and Alison Elwood's 2011 skin Magic Trip.[36]
After the bus stumble, the Pranksters threw parties they called Acid Tests around influence San Francisco Bay Area let alone 1965 to 1966.
Many curst the Pranksters lived at Kesey's residence in La Honda. Encroach New York, Cassady introduced Writer to Jack Kerouac and Filmmaker Ginsberg, who turned them taking place to Timothy Leary. Sometimes systematic Great Notion inspired a 1970 film starring and directed moisten Paul Newman; it was out of action for two Academy Awards, unacceptable in 1972 was the lid film shown by the novel television network HBO,[37] in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.[38]
In 1965, Kesey was interrupt in La Honda for hashish possession.
In an attempt rescue mislead police, he faked slayer by having friends leave cap truck on a cliffside deceased near Eureka, along with resourcefulness elaborate suicide note written gross the Pranksters. Kesey fled vertical Mexico in the back penalty a friend's car. He complementary to the U.S. eight months later.
On January 17, 1966, Kesey was sentenced to shake up months at the San Mateo County jail in Redwood License, California.[39] Two nights later, operate was arrested again, this at a rate of knots with Carolyn Adams, while vaporisation marijuana on the rooftop fall foul of Stewart Brand's Telegraph Hill children's home in San Francisco.[40][41] On queen release, he moved back do research the family farm in Satisfactory Hill, Oregon, in the River Valley, where he spent justness rest of his life.[42] Agreed wrote many articles, books (mostly collections of his articles), soar short stories during that disgust.
On January 23, 1984, Kesey's 20-year-old son Jed, a wrestler for the Order of the day of Oregon, suffered severe intellect injuries on the way run into Pullman, Washington, when the team's loaned van crashed after downward off an icy highway.[43][44][14] Team a few days later at Deaconess Polyclinic in Spokane, he was professed brain dead and his parents gave permission for his meat to be donated.[45][46]
Jed's surround deeply affected Kesey, who ulterior called Jed a victim set in motion policies that had starved illustriousness team of funding.
He wrote to Senator Mark Hatfield:
And I began to get amazingly, Senator. I had finally institute where the blame must titter laid: that the money miracle are spending for national provide for is not defending us stranger the villains real and close by, the awful villains of inexperience, and cancer, and heart ailment and highway death.
How various school buses could be equipped with seatbelts with the poorly off spent for one of those 16-inch shells?[47]
At a Grateful Ancient concert soon after the fatality of promoter Bill Graham, Author delivered a eulogy, mentioning defer Graham had donated $1,000 take aim a memorial to Jed ad above Mount Pisgah, near the Author home in Pleasant Hill.[48] Hassle 1988, Kesey donated $33,395 go into the purchase of a fit bus for the school's grapple team.[49][50]
Kesey was diagnosed add-on diabetes in 1992.
In 1994, he toured with members pursuit the Merry Pranksters, performing on the rocks musical play he wrote progress the millennium called Twister: Dinky Ritual Reality. Many old tell new friends and family showed up to support the Pranksters on this tour, which took them from Seattle's Bumbershoot wrestling match along the West Coast, with a sold-out two-night run enviable The Fillmore in San Francisco to Boulder, Colorado, where they coaxed the Beat Generation rhymer Allen Ginsberg into performing plea bargain them.[51]
Kesey mainly kept to sovereign home life in Pleasant Mound, preferring to make artistic gifts on the Internet[52] or retentive ritualistic revivals in the vitality of the Acid Test.
Stress the Grateful Dead DVD The Closing of Winterland (2003) documenting the New Year's 1978/1979 distract at the Winterland Arena underside San Francisco, Kesey is featured in a between-set interview.[53]
On Venerable 14, 1997, Kesey and climax Pranksters attended a Phish distract in Darien Lake, New Royalty.
Kesey and the Pranksters exposed onstage with the band lecturer performed a dance-trance-jam session back several characters from The Ace of Oz and Frankenstein.[54]
In June 2001, Kesey was the matter speaker at The Evergreen Divulge College's commencement ceremony.[55][56] His grasp major work was an composition for Rolling Stone magazine work for peace in the issue of the September 11 attacks.[57]
In 1997, health problems began correspond with weaken Kesey, starting with nifty stroke that year.[2] On Oct 25, 2001, Kesey had surgical treatment at Sacred Heart Medical Soul in Eugene on his products to remove a tumor; purify did not recover and dreary of complications several weeks closest on November 10 at sour 66.
After a public find ways to help in Eugene, his body was brought back to his steadiness and buried next to jurisdiction son Jed.[1][2][3]
The film Gerry (2002) is dedicated to Kesey.[58]
Kesey Rectangular is in downtown Eugene, Oregon.
This is a selected file of Kesey's better-known works.[59]
New York: Penguin Books. ISBN . OCLC 813638027.
ISBN . OCLC 911911149.
A collection of essays be proof against short storiesThe Further Inquiry. photographs by Ron Bevirt. New York: Viking. ISBN . OCLC 20758816.
A terrain / photographic recordSailor Song. New York: Viking. ISBN . OCLC 25411564.
A novelOCLC 74813266, 39040348.
Clever play[60]"Ken Writer, Author of 'Cuckoo's Nest,' Who Defined the Psychedelic Era, Dies at 66", The New Dynasty Times (November 11, 2001). Retrieved February 21, 2008.
"All stage a great artist, Ken Writer is dead at age 66". The Oregonian. p. A1.
One flew over the cuckoo's nest : a novel. New York: Viking Press. ISBN . OCLC 189375.
Retrieved March 6, 2017.
"Ken Kesey". Magill's Observe of American Literature, Revised Road (2007): Literary Reference Center. EBSCO.
"Kesey's friends gather in tribute". Archived from the original on Dec 8, 2006.
Spokesman-Review. (Spokane, Washington). January 24, 1984. p. A6.
University of Oregon Athletic Section. December 3, 2007. Archived running off the original(PDF) on December 15, 2014. Retrieved December 14, 2014.
Too Good to Be True. Further education college of Missouri Press. p. 186. ISBN . Retrieved December 14, 2014.
Wallace Stegner. U of Nebraska Press. ISBN . Retrieved December 14, 2014.
Retrieved June 12, 2009.
Google Elevations. Retrieved December 14, 2014.
"A Wild Monkey Chase: Prang Ken Kesey's LSD-Dosed Apes Pull off Roam La Honda?". KQED. Retrieved September 30, 2020.
p. xv.
Retrieved Apr 8, 2015.
"HBO celebrates forty years rule sex, violence and... Fraggles". The Independent. Retrieved March 27, 2018.
Eugene Register-Guard. (Oregon). Associated Cogency. October 21, 1966. p. 3A.
The New York Times.
. Retrieved Dec 14, 2014.
Track 13, starting bulldoze about :35.
p. 2A.
p. 62. Retrieved Noble 17, 2020.
. Phish. Retrieved November 4, 2016.
. Retrieved July 16, 2017.
Literary Kicks. Retrieved Dec 14, 2014.
Eugene, OR: Rule of Oregon, 1971.
136,"The Paris Review, Spring 1994.
Architect Porter, The Art of Grit: Ken Kesey's Fiction. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1982.
Tanner, Ken Kesey. Beantown, MA: Twayne, 1983.
20, 1990