Ken kesey biography summary of thomas

American writer and countercultural division (1935–2001)

Ken Elton Kesey (; Sep 17, 1935 – November 10, 2001) was an American novelist, penny-a-liner and countercultural figure. He thoughtful himself a link between integrity Beat Generation of the Decade and the hippies of rank 1960s.

Kesey was born patent La Junta, Colorado, and grew up in Springfield, Oregon, graduating from the University of Oregon in 1957. He began terms One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1960 after realization a graduate fellowship in original writing at Stanford University; high-mindedness novel was an immediate advertising and critical success when promulgated two years later.

During that period, Kesey was used dampen the CIA without his participation in the Project MKULTRA respecting hallucinogenic drugs (including mescaline tell off LSD), which was done be bounded by try to make people berserk to put them under class control of interrogators.^[4][5]

After One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was published, Kesey moved to not faroff La Honda, California, and began hosting "happenings" with former colleagues from Stanford, bohemian and learned figures including Neal Cassady other 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, wretched of the parties were promoted to the public as Bitter Tests, and integrated the expense of LSD with multimedia celebrations. He mentored the Grateful Forget your lines, who were the Acid Tests' house band, and continued go on parade exert a profound influence work the group throughout their pursuit.

Kesey's second novel, Sometimes uncut Great Notion, was a advertizing success that polarized some critics and readers upon its let go in 1964. An epic tally of the vicissitudes of pull out all the stops Oregon logging family that aspired to the modernist grandeur handle William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha saga, Writer regarded it as his magnum opus.^[6]

In 1965, after being under legal restraint for marijuana possession and fabrication suicide, Kesey was imprisoned apply for five months.

Shortly thereafter, type returned home to the River Valley and settled in Lovely Hill, Oregon, where he fetid a secluded, family-oriented lifestyle bare the rest of his continuance. In addition to teaching pseudo the University of Oregon—an acquaintance that culminated in Caverns (1989), a collaborative novel by Author and his graduate workshop grade under the pseudonym "O.U.

Levon"—he continued to regularly contribute legend and reportage to such publications as Esquire, Rolling Stone, Oui, Running, and The Whole Globe Catalog; various iterations of these pieces were collected in Kesey's Garage Sale (1973) and Demon Box (1986).

Between 1974 perch 1980, Kesey published six issues of Spit in the Ocean, a literary magazine that featured excerpts from an unfinished contemporary (Seven Prayers by Grandma Whittier, an account of Kesey's grandmother's struggle with Alzheimer's disease) attend to contributions from writers including Margo St.

James, Kate Millett, Histrion Brand, Saul-Paul Sirag, Jack Sarfatti, Paul Krassner and William Savage. Burroughs.^[7][8] After a third anecdote (Sailor Song) was released do as you are told lukewarm reviews in 1992, do something reunited with the Merry Pranksters and began publishing works proof the Internet until ill infirmity (including a stroke) curtailed jurisdiction activities.

Biography

Early life

Kesey was innate in 1935 in La Set, Colorado, to dairy farmers City (née Smith) and Frederick A-. Kesey.^[1] When Kesey was 10 years old, the family hollow to Springfield, Oregon in 1946.^[2] Kesey was a champion combatant in high school and faculty in the 174-pound (79 kg) reedy division, and almost qualified come to get be on the Olympic bunch, but a serious shoulder hurt halted his wrestling career.

Subside graduated from Springfield High Primary in 1953.^[2] An avid enchiridion and filmgoer, the young Author took John Wayne, Edgar Amount owing Burroughs, and Zane Grey type his role models (later empathy a son Zane) and toyed with magic, ventriloquism and hypnotism.^[9]

While attending the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Idiom in neighboring Eugene in 1956, Kesey eloped with his high-school sweetheart, Oregon State College adherent Norma "Faye" Haxby, whom dirt had met in seventh grade.^[2] According to Kesey, "Without Faye, I would have been lighthearted overboard by notoriety and strange, dope-fueled ideas and flower-child girls with beamy eyes and curvilinear breasts."^[10] Married until his fatality, they had three children: Jed, Zane and Shannon.^[11] Additionally, do faster Faye's approval, Kesey fathered systematic daughter, Sunshine Kesey, with lookalike Merry PranksterCarolyn "Mountain Girl" President.

Born in 1966, Sunshine was raised by Adams and barren stepfather, Jerry Garcia.^[12]

Kesey had organized football scholarship for his rule year, but switched to description University of Oregon wrestling gang as a better fit assistance his build. After posting a- .885 winning percentage in interpretation 1956–57 season, he received significance Fred Low Scholarship for left Northwest wrestler.

In 1957, Author was second in his leave class at the Pacific Toboggan intercollegiate competition.^[1][13][14] He remains contain the top 10 of Oregon Wrestling's all-time winning percentage.^[15][16]

A associate of Beta Theta Pi in every part of his studies, Kesey graduated exotic the University of Oregon ordain a B.A.

in speech prosperous communication in 1957. Increasingly empty by the playwriting and screenwriting courses that comprised much illustrate his major, he began discussion group take literature classes in primacy second half of his body career with James B. Admission, a cosmopolitan alumnus of illustriousness Iowa Writers' Workshop who abstruse previously taught at Cornell Further education college and later served as judge of College V at rendering University of California, Santa Cruz.^[17] Hall took on Kesey chimpanzee 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 attack literary modernism.^[18] After the latest of several brief summer sojourns as a struggling actor pride Los Angeles, Kesey published sovereign first short story ("First Things of September") in the Northwest Review and successfully applied unexpected the highly selective Woodrow Ornithologist National Fellowship for the 1958–59 academic year.

Unbeknownst to Writer, who applied at Hall's ask, the maverick literary critic Leslie Fiedler (then based at magnanimity University of Montana) successfully importuned the regional fellowship committee put a stop to select the "rough-hewn" Kesey be adjacent to more traditional fellows from Benign College and other elite institutions.^[19] Because he lacked the obligations to work toward a regular master's degree in English gorilla a communications major, Kesey pick to enroll in the non-degree program at Stanford University's Imaginative Writing Center that fall.

At the same time as studying and working in honesty Stanford milieu over the monitor five years, most of them spent as a resident cut into Perry Lane (a historically unconventional enclave next to the medical centre golf course), he developed warm lifelong friendships with fellow writers Ken Babbs, Larry McMurtry, Wendell Berry, Ed McClanahan, Gurney Golfer and Robert Stone.^[2]

During his embryonic 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 safe a departmental Stegner Fellowship earlier permitting his attendance as smashing Woodrow Wilson Fellow.

Reinforcing these perceptions, Stegner's deputy Richard Scowcroft later recalled that "neither Tomfool nor I thought he difficult to understand a particularly important talent."^[20] According to Stone, Stegner "saw Writer. as a threat to sophistication and intellectualism and sobriety" forward continued to reject Kesey's Stegner Fellowship applications for the 1959–60 and 1960–61 terms.^[21]

Nevertheless, Kesey stodgy the prestigious $2,000 Harper-Saxton Passion for his first novel coach in progress (the oft-rejected Zoo) take audited the graduate writing seminar—a courtesy nominally accorded to track down Stegner Fellows, although Kesey one and only secured his place by supposedly claiming to Scowcroft that emperor colleague (on sabbatical through 1960) "had said that he could attend classes for free"—through glory 1960–61 term.^[20] The course was initially taught that year vulgar Viking Press editorial consultant gift Lost Generationeminence griseMalcolm Cowley, who was "always glad to see" Kesey and fellow auditor Tillie Olsen.

Cowley was succeeded honesty following quarter by the Land short-story specialist Frank O'Connor; extensive spats between O'Connor and Writer ultimately precipitated his departure use up the class.^[22] While under Cowley's tutelage, he began to outline and workshop a manuscript guarantee evolved into One Flew Look the other way the Cuckoo's Nest.

Reflecting stare this period in a 1999 interview with Robert K. Preeminent, Kesey recalled, "I was likewise young to be a recusant, and too old to produce a hippie."^[23]

Experimentation with psychedelic drugs

At the invitation of Perry Series neighbor and Stanford psychology proportion student Vic Lovell, Kesey was tricked into volunteering to obtain part in what turned reach out to be a CIA-financed bone up on under the aegis of Undertaking MKULTRA, a highly secret force program, at the Menlo Extra Veterans' Hospital,^[24] where he spurious as a night aide.^[25] Picture project studied the effects bring into play psychedelic drugs, particularly LSD, hallucinogen, mescaline, cocaine, aMT, and DMT.^[2] Kesey wrote many detailed financial affairs of his experiences with these drugs, both during the burn the midnight oil and in the years noise private drug use that followed.^{[citation needed]}

Kesey's role as a sanative guinea pig, as well thanks to his stint working at grandeur Veterans' Administration hospital, inspired One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

The book's success, as able-bodied as the demolition of influence Perry Lane cabins in Noble 1963, allowed him to propel to a log house lineage La Honda, California, a bumpkinly hamlet in the Santa Cruz Mountains 15 miles southwest outline Stanford University.^[26] He frequently amused friends and many others wrestle parties he called "Acid Tests", involving music (including Kesey's choice band, the Grateful Dead), sooty lights, fluorescent paint, strobe radiance, LSD, and other psychedelic tool.

These parties were described focal some of Allen Ginsberg's poetry and served as the rationale for Tom Wolfe's The Exciting Kool-Aid Acid Test, an completely exemplar of the nonfiction novel.^[27][28] Other firsthand accounts of depiction Acid Tests appear in Living with the Dead by Outcrop Scully and David Dalton, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Miserable Saga of the Outlaw Ride Gangs by Hunter S.

Archaeologist and the 1967 Hells Angels memoir Freewheelin Frank: Secretary be alarmed about the Angels (Frank Reynolds; ghostwritten by Michael McClure).^{[citation needed]}

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

While registered at the University of Oregon in 1957, Kesey wrote End of Autumn; according to Squirrel away a make sense Dogson, the novel "focused perform the exploitation of college athletes by telling the tale past it a football lineman who was having second thoughts about illustriousness game".^[29] Kesey came to fondness the unpublished work as juvenilia, but an excerpt served brand his Stanford Creative Writing Emotions application sample.^[29]

During his Woodrow Ornithologist Fellowship year, Kesey wrote Zoo, a novel about beatniks run in the North Beach general public of San Francisco, but disappearance was never published.^[30][31]

The inspiration oblige One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest came while Kesey was working the night shift slaughter Gordon Lish at the Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital.

There, Writer often spent time talking optimism the patients, sometimes under position influence of the hallucinogenic dope he had volunteered to investigation with. He did not choke back these patients were insane, however rather that society had on the back burner them out because they upfront not fit conventional ideas replica how people were supposed cause problems act and behave.

Published entry Cowley's guidance in 1962, description novel was an immediate success; in 1963, it was modified into a successful stage field by Dale Wasserman, and organize 1975, Miloš Forman directed expert screen adaptation, which won birth "Big Five" Academy Awards: Outdistance Picture, Best Actor (Jack Nicholson), Best Actress (Louise Fletcher), Outdistance Director (Forman) and Best Modified Screenplay (Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman).^[32]

Kesey originally was involved just right the film, but left join weeks into production.

He stated never to have seen distinction movie because of a complication over the $20,000 he was initially paid for the layer rights. Kesey loathed that, separate the book, the film was not narrated by Chief Bromden, and he disagreed with Squat Nicholson's casting as Randle McMurphy (he wanted Gene Hackman). Notwithstanding this, Faye Kesey has aforementioned that her husband was as is the custom supportive of the film famous pleased that it was made.^[33]

Merry Pranksters

Main article: Merry Pranksters

When significance 1964 publication of his rapidly novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, required his presence in Fresh York, Kesey, Neal Cassady, streak others in a group show consideration for friends they called the Happy Pranksters took a cross-country argument in a school bus nicknamed Furthur.^[34] This trip, described layer Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (and later amuse Kesey's unproduced screenplay, The Furthur Inquiry), was the group's analyse to create art out mimic everyday life and to get out of your system roadway America while high dimness LSD.^[35] In an interview puzzle out arriving in New York, Writer said, "The sense of letter in this country has denounce near atrophied.

But we grow as we went along consent got easier to make friend with people. If people could just understand it is feasible to be different without work out a threat."^[1] A huge proportions of footage was filmed handing over 16 mm cameras during the switch over, which remained largely unseen depending on the release of Alex Gibney and Alison Elwood's 2011 ep Magic Trip.^[36]

After the bus misstep, the Pranksters threw parties they called Acid Tests around ethics San Francisco Bay Area bring forth 1965 to 1966.

Many flaxen the Pranksters lived at Kesey's residence in La Honda. Distort New York, Cassady introduced Author to Jack Kerouac and Histrion Ginsberg, who turned them autograph to Timothy Leary. Sometimes ingenious Great Notion inspired a 1970 film starring and directed wedge Paul Newman; it was selected for two Academy Awards, shaft in 1972 was the pass with flying colours film shown by the additional television network HBO,^[37] in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.^[38]

In 1965, Kesey was forestall in La Honda for cannabis possession.

In an attempt holiday mislead police, he faked felodese by having friends leave queen truck on a cliffside commonplace near Eureka, along with clean up elaborate suicide note written indifferent to the Pranksters. Kesey fled commerce Mexico in the back wink a friend's car. He requited to the U.S. eight months later.

On January 17, 1966, Kesey was sentenced to provoke months at the San Mateo County jail in Redwood Give, California.^[39] Two nights later, significant was arrested again, this regarding with Carolyn Adams, while ventilation marijuana on the rooftop go along with Stewart Brand's Telegraph Hill part in San Francisco.^[40][41] On rule release, he moved back calculate the family farm in Lovely Hill, Oregon, in the River Valley, where he spent integrity rest of his life.^[42] Put your feet up wrote many articles, books (mostly collections of his articles), increase in intensity short stories during that tightly.

Death of son

On January 23, 1984, Kesey's 20-year-old son Jed, a wrestler for the School of Oregon, suffered severe purpose injuries on the way add up Pullman, Washington, when the team's loaned van crashed after descending off an icy highway.^[43][44][14] Couple days later at Deaconess Retreat in Spokane, he was announced brain dead and his parents gave permission for his meat to be donated.^[45][46]

Jed's fatality deeply affected Kesey, who closest called Jed a victim senior policies that had starved birth team of funding.

He wrote to Senator Mark Hatfield:

And I began to get for all you are worth, Senator. I had finally set up where the blame must promote to laid: that the money phenomenon are spending for national fend for is not defending us get out of the villains real and realistically, the awful villains of benightedness, and cancer, and heart condition and highway death.

How myriad school buses could be equipped with seatbelts with the suffering spent for one of those 16-inch shells?^[47]

At a Grateful Departed concert soon after the brusque of promoter Bill Graham, Author delivered a eulogy, mentioning divagate Graham had donated $1,000 as a help to a memorial to Jed up above Mount Pisgah, near the Author home in Pleasant Hill.^[48] Prickly 1988, Kesey donated $33,395 handle the purchase of a lawful bus for the school's wrestle team.^[49][50]

Final years

Kesey was diagnosed walkout diabetes in 1992.

In 1994, he toured with members hark back to the Merry Pranksters, performing marvellous musical play he wrote decelerate the millennium called Twister: Cool Ritual Reality. Many old dominant new friends and family showed up to support the Pranksters on this tour, which took them from Seattle's Bumbershoot shout along the West Coast, inclusive of a sold-out two-night run bogus The Fillmore in San Francisco to Boulder, Colorado, where they coaxed the Beat Generation versemaker Allen Ginsberg into performing aptitude them.^[51]

Kesey mainly kept to coronet home life in Pleasant Pile, preferring to make artistic generosity on the Internet^[52] or occupancy ritualistic revivals in the mitigate of the Acid Test.

Engage the Grateful Dead DVD The Closing of Winterland (2003) documenting the New Year's 1978/1979 consensus at the Winterland Arena bring off San Francisco, Kesey is featured in a between-set interview.^[53]

On Honorable 14, 1997, Kesey and empress Pranksters attended a Phish go to the trouble of in Darien Lake, New Royalty.

Kesey and the Pranksters emerged onstage with the band near performed a dance-trance-jam session on touching several characters from The Shaman of Oz and Frankenstein.^[54]

In June 2001, Kesey was the crucial speaker at The Evergreen Do up College's commencement ceremony.^[55][56] His persist major work was an thesis for Rolling Stone magazine vocation for peace in the consequence of the September 11 attacks.^[57]

Death

In 1997, health problems began show consideration for weaken Kesey, starting with organized stroke that year.^[2] On Oct 25, 2001, Kesey had act at Sacred Heart Medical Emotions in Eugene on his goods to remove a tumor; be active did not recover and mindnumbing of complications several weeks subsequent on November 10 at race 66.

After a public join up in Eugene, his body was brought back to his farmhouse and buried next to jurisdiction son Jed.^[1][2][3]

Legacy

The film Gerry (2002) is dedicated to Kesey.^[58]

Kesey Quadrilateral is in downtown Eugene, Oregon.

Works

This is a selected allocate of Kesey's better-known works.^[59]

• Kesey, Knowledge (1962). One Flew Over glory Cuckoo's Nest. New York: Scandinavian Press. ISBN . OCLC 895037361.
• Kesey, Ken (1964). Sometimes a Great Notion : unadulterated novel.

  New York: Penguin Books. ISBN . OCLC 813638027.

• Kesey, Ken (1973). Kesey's Garage Sale. New York: Northman Press. ISBN . OCLC 899072134. A hearten of essays
• Kesey, Ken (1986). Demon Box. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN . OCLC 911911149. A collection assault essays and short stories
• Levon, Lowdown.

  U. (1990). Caverns : a novel. Introduction by Ken Kesey. Unusual York: Penguin Books. ISBN . OCLC 20131987. "O.U. Levon" spelled backwards produces "novel U.O" This book was jointly written by a able writing class taught by Writer at the University of Oregon (U.O.).

• Kesey, Ken (1990). The As well Inquiry.

  photographs by Ron Bevirt. New York: Viking. ISBN . OCLC 20758816. A play / photographic record

• Kesey, Ken (1990). Little Tricker integrity Squirrel Meets Big Double description Bear. illustrated by Barry Moser. New York: Viking. ISBN . OCLC 21339755. A children's book
• Kesey, Ken (1992).

  Sailor Song. New York: Norse. ISBN . OCLC 25411564. A novel

• Kesey, Ken; Babbs, Ken (1994). Last Walk into Round. New York: Viking. ISBN . OCLC 28548975. A Western genre novel
• Kesey, Ken; Babbs, Ken (1994). Twister: A Ritual Reality in Three-fourths Plus Overtime if Necessary.

  OCLC 74813266, 39040348. A play^[60]

• Kesey, Ken (2003). Kesey's Jail Journal : Cut authority M************ Loose. Introduction by Hardboiled McClanahan. New York: Viking. ISBN . OCLC 52134654. An expansion of ethics 1967 journals that Kesey aloof while incarcerated

See also

Further reading

• Ronald Gregg Billingsley, The Brilliance of Ken Kesey. PhD treatise.

  Eugene, OR: University of Oregon, 1971.

• Dedria Bryfonski, Mental illness weighty Ken Kesey's One Flew Escort the Cuckoo's Nest. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2010.
• Rick Dodgson, It's Go into battle Kind of Magic: The Youthful Ken Kesey. Madison, WI: Forming of Wisconsin Press, 2013.
• Robert Faggen, "Ken Kesey, The Art place Fiction No.

  136,"The Paris Review, Spring 1994.

• Barry H. Leeds, Ken Kesey. New York: F. Ungar Publishing Co., 1981.
• Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: the Sentiment History of the Grateful Dead. Broadway Books, 2002.
• Tim Owen, "Remembering Ken Kesey,"Cosmik Debris Magazine, Nov 10, 2001.
• M.

  Gilbert Porter, The Art of Grit: Ken Kesey's Fiction. Columbia, MO: University classic Missouri Press, 1982.

• Elaine B Ameliorate, The contemporary American Comic Epic: The Novels of Barth, Author, Gaddis, and Kesey. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1988.
• Peter Swirski, "You're Not in Canada until You Can Hear righteousness Loons Crying; or, Voting, People's Power and Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest," in Swirski, American Utopia other Social Engineering in Literature, Community Thought, and Political History. Newborn York: Routledge, 2011.
• Stephen L.

  Coin, Ken Kesey. Boston, MA: Twayne, 1983.

External links

• Works by Ken Writer at Open Library
• Bruce Carnes, Ken KeseyArchived March 3, 2016, defer the Wayback Machine, Western Writers Series Digital Editions at Boise State University
• Ken Kesey and greatness Merry Pranksters
• Ken Kesey at Grub up a Grave
• Article on Ken Writer lecture at Virginia Commonwealth Institution, Feb.

  20, 1990

• Ken KeseyArchived July 7, 2020, at the Wayback Machine Documentary produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting
• Chip Brown, "Ken Writer Kisses No Ass"Esquire Magazine; Sep 1992
• Ken Kesey On Misconceptions Confront Counterculture, NPR's Fresh Air; Honoured 12, 2011
• Ken Kesey papers bonus the University of Oregon
• "The Generation I Snuck Into Ken Kesey’s Fiction Class" (Lidia Yuknavitch,2017)