Ken Kesey

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Ken Kesey
BornKen Elton Kesey
(1935-09-17)September 17, 1935
La Junta, Colorado, U.S.
DiedNovember 10, 2001(2001-11-10) (aged 66)
Eugene, Oregon, U.S.[1][2][3]
Occupation
  • Novelist
  • short story writer
  • essayist
  • poet
Education
GenrePostmodernism
Literary movementCountercultural
Notable worksOne Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962)
Sometimes a Great Notion (1964)

Ken Elton Kesey (/ˈkiːziː/; September 17, 1935 – November 10, 2001) was an American novelist, essayist and countercultural figure. He considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.

Kesey was born in

hallucinogenic drugs (including mescaline and LSD), which was done to try to make people insane to put them under the control of interrogators.[4][5]

After One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was published, Kesey moved to nearby

happenings" with former colleagues from Stanford, bohemian and literary figures including Neal Cassady and other friends, who became collectively known as the Merry Pranksters. As documented in Tom Wolfe's 1968 New Journalism book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, some of the parties were promoted to the public as Acid Tests, and integrated the consumption of LSD with multimedia performances. He mentored the Grateful 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,

Yoknapatawpha saga, Kesey regarded it as his magnum opus.[6]

In 1965, after being arrested for

The Whole Earth Catalog
; various iterations of these pieces were collected in Kesey's Garage Sale (1973) and Demon Box (1986).

Between 1974 and 1980, Kesey published six issues of Spit in the Ocean, a

Saul-Paul Sirag, Jack Sarfatti, Paul Krassner and William 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.

Biography

Early life

Kesey was born in 1935 in

hypnotism.[9]

While attending the

University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication in neighboring Eugene 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 fellow Merry Prankster Carolyn "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 of

Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship
for the 1958–59 academic year.

Unbeknownst to Kesey, who applied at Hall's request, the maverick literary critic Leslie Fiedler (then based at the University of Montana) successfully importuned the regional fellowship committee to select the "rough-hewn" Kesey alongside more traditional fellows from Reed 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 at Stanford 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 writers Ken Babbs, Larry McMurtry, Wendell Berry, Ed McClanahan, Gurney Norman and Robert Stone.[2]

During his initial 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 for a departmental Stegner Fellowship before permitting his attendance as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. Reinforcing these perceptions, Stegner's deputy Richard 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-rejected Zoo) 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 by Viking Press editorial consultant and Lost Generation eminence grise Malcolm Cowley, who was "always glad to see" Kesey and fellow auditor Tillie Olsen. Cowley was succeeded the following quarter by the Irish short-story specialist Frank 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 into One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Reflecting upon this period in a 1999 interview with Robert K. Elder, Kesey recalled, "I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie."[23]

Experimentation with psychedelic drugs

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 a

DMT.[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
]

Kesey's role as a medical guinea pig, as well as his stint working at the

Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs by Hunter S. Thompson and the 1967 Hells Angels memoir Freewheelin Frank: Secretary of the Angels (Frank Reynolds; ghostwritten by Michael McClure).[citation needed
]

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

While enrolled at the University of Oregon in 1957, Kesey wrote End 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 wrote Zoo, a novel about beatniks living in the

North Beach community of San Francisco, but it was never published.[30][31]

The inspiration for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest came while Kesey was working the night shift with Gordon Lish at the Menlo 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 successful stage play by Dale Wasserman, and in 1975, Miloš Forman directed a screen adaptation, which won the "Big Five" Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor (Jack Nicholson), Best Actress (Louise Fletcher), Best Director (Forman) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Lawrence Hauben and Bo 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 with Jack Nicholson's casting as Randle McMurphy (he wanted Gene Hackman). Despite this, Faye Kesey has said that her husband was generally supportive of the film and pleased that it was made.[33]

Merry Pranksters

Main article: Merry Pranksters

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 in a school bus nicknamed Furthur.[34] This trip, described in Tom Wolfe's The 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 on 16 mm film during the trip, which remained largely unseen until the release of Alex Gibney and Alison Elwood's 2011 film Magic 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 to

HBO,[37] in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.[38]

In 1965, Kesey was arrested in La Honda for

Redwood City, California.[39] Two nights later, he was arrested again, this time with Carolyn Adams, while smoking marijuana on the rooftop of Stewart Brand's Telegraph Hill home in San Francisco.[40][41] 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.[42]
He wrote many articles, books (mostly collections of his articles), and short stories during that time.

Death of son

On January 23, 1984, Kesey's 20-year-old son Jed, a wrestler for the University of Oregon, suffered severe head injuries on the way to Pullman, Washington, when the team's loaned van crashed after sliding off an icy highway.[43][44][14] Two days later at Deaconess Hospital in Spokane, 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 Senator Mark 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 promoter Bill Graham, Kesey delivered a eulogy, mentioning that Graham had donated $1,000 toward a memorial to Jed atop Mount Pisgah, near the Kesey home in Pleasant Hill.[48] In 1988, Kesey donated $33,395 toward the purchase of a proper bus for the school's wrestling team.[49][50]

Final years

Kesey was diagnosed with

San Francisco to Boulder, Colorado, where they coaxed the Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg into performing with them.[51]

Kesey mainly kept to his home life in

Winterland Arena in San Francisco, Kesey is featured in a between-set interview.[53]

On August 14, 1997, Kesey and his Pranksters attended a Phish concert in Darien Lake, New York. Kesey and the Pranksters appeared onstage with the band and performed a dance-trance-jam session involving several characters from The Wizard of Oz and Frankenstein.[54]

In June 2001, Kesey was the keynote speaker at

The Evergreen State College's commencement ceremony.[55][56] His last major work was an essay for Rolling Stone magazine calling for peace in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.[57]

Death

In 1997, health problems began to weaken Kesey, starting with a stroke that year.[2] On October 25, 2001, Kesey had surgery at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene on his liver to remove a tumor; 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]

Legacy

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

Kesey Square is in downtown Eugene, Oregon.

Works

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

See also

Footnotes

  1. ^ a b c d e Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. "Ken Kesey, Author of 'Cuckoo's Nest', Who Defined the Psychedelic Era, Dies at 66", The New York Times (November 11, 2001). Retrieved February 21, 2008.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h Baker, Jeff (November 11, 2001). "All times a great artist, Ken Kesey is dead at age 66". The Oregonian. p. A1.
  3. ^ a b Keefer, Bob; Palmer, Susan (November 11, 2001). "Oregon loses a legend". Eugene Register-Guard. (Oregon). p. 1A.
  4. OCLC 189375
    .
  5. ^ Brandon (October 12, 2021). "Ken Kesey On Misconceptions Of Counterculture". The Beat Museum. Retrieved December 20, 2024.
  6. ^ "Stanford Magazine –Article". Retrieved March 6, 2017.
  7. ^ Faggen, Robert (1994). "Ken Kesey, The Art of Fiction No. 136". The Paris Review. No. 130 (Spring ed.). Retrieved November 22, 2021.
  8. ^ "Grateful Dead Family Discography: Spit in the Ocean Bibliography". Retrieved March 6, 2017.
  9. ^ Macdonald, Gina, and Andrew Macdonald. "Ken Kesey". Magill's Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition (2007): Literary Reference Center. EBSCO.
  10. Esquire Magazine
    (September 1992).
  11. ^ "Ken Kesey, Author of 'Cuckoo's Nest', Who Defined the Psychedelic Era, Dies at 66", The New York Times (November 11, 2001).
  12. ^ Robins, Cynthia (December 7, 2001). "Kesey's friends gather in tribute". Archived from the original on December 8, 2006.
  13. OCLC 701720769
    . Retrieved December 14, 2014.
  14. ^ a b "Crash takes second life". Spokesman-Review. (Spokane, Washington). January 24, 1984. p. A6. Writer's son, Oregon wrestler Jed Kesey, dies of injuries
  15. ^ "Top Wrestlers". Eugene, OR: Save Oregon Wrestling Foundation. Archived from the original on December 14, 2014. Retrieved December 14, 2014.
  16. ^ "2006–07 Stats, History, Opponent Info – University of Oregon Wrestling" (PDF). University of Oregon Athletic Department. December 3, 2007. Archived from the original (PDF) on December 15, 2014. Retrieved December 14, 2014.
  17. ^ "Hall, James B(yron)", International Who's Who in Poetry, 2004, p. 138.
  18. ^ Jeff Baker, "James B. Hall: Writer, teacher", The Oregonian/OregonLive, May 14, 2008.
  19. ISBN 978-0-8262-6277-6
    . Retrieved December 14, 2014. ken kesey woodrow wilson.
  20. ^ a b Philip L. Fradkin, Wallace Stegner and the American West
  21. ISBN 978-0-8032-2537-4
    . Retrieved December 14, 2014.
  22. ^ Cowley, M. (1976). "Ken Kesey at Stanford", Northwest Review, 16(1), 1.
  23. Salon Magazine. 2001. Archived from the original
    on December 1, 2008. Retrieved June 12, 2009.
  24. ^ VA Palo Alto Health Care System. "Menlo Park Division – VA Palo Alto Health Care System". va.gov. Retrieved December 14, 2014.
  25. ^ Reilly, Edward C. "Ken Kesey". Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Second Revised Edition (2000): EBSCO. Web. Nov 10. 2010.
  26. ^ "Perry Ave, West Menlo Park, CA 94025 to 7940 La Honda Rd, La Honda, CA 94020 – Google Maps". Google Maps. Retrieved December 14, 2014.
  27. ISSN 0261-3077
    . Retrieved September 11, 2017.
  28. ^ Alexandra, Rae (September 22, 2020). "A Wild Monkey Chase: Do Ken Kesey's LSD-Dosed Apes Still Roam La Honda?". KQED. Retrieved September 30, 2020.
  29. ^
    ISBN 978-0-299-29513-4
    . Retrieved March 6, 2017 – via Internet Archive. end of autumn kesey.
  30. ^ Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher (November 11, 2001). "Ken Kesey, Author of 'Cuckoo's Nest,' Who Defined the Psychedelic Era, Dies at 66". The New York Times. Retrieved June 10, 2018.
  31. ^ Dodgson, Rick (2013). It's All A Kind of Magic: The Young Ken Kesey. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. p. xv.
  32. ^ "The 48th Academy Awards – 1976". Oscars.org – Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. October 4, 2014.
  33. ^ "11 Authors Who Hated the Movie Versions of Their Books". Mental Floss. Retrieved December 14, 2014.
  34. ^ "National Museum of American History Collections: Signboard, Pass the Acid Test". americanhistory.si.edu. Retrieved April 8, 2015.
  35. ^ "Ken Kesey Merry Pranksters collection, (bulk 1964–1969)". oac.cdlib.org.
  36. ^ Jenkins, Mark (August 4, 2011). "'Magic Trip': High Times With The Merry Pranksters". NPR. Retrieved August 20, 2021.
  37. ^ Walker, Tim (November 18, 2012). "HBO celebrates forty years of sex, violence and... Fraggles". The Independent. Retrieved March 27, 2018.
  38. ^ "Local History: NEPA put HBO on the dial". The Scranton Times-Tribune. November 3, 2013. Retrieved March 27, 2018.
  39. ^ 1,000 arrested protesting Iraq war, San Francisco Chronicle, Johnny Miller, January 16, 2016.
  40. ^ "Ken Kesey, novelist, arrested in Bay Area". Eugene Register-Guard. (Oregon). Associated Press. October 21, 1966. p. 3A.
  41. Rolling Stone
    , Charles Perry, February 26, 1976. Retrieved January 16, 2016.
  42. ^ Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher (November 11, 2001). "Ken Kesey, Author of 'Cuckoo's Nest,' Who Defined the Psychedelic Era, Dies at 66". The New York Times.
  43. ^ "UO wrestlers' van crashes, kills one". Eugene Register-Guard. (Oregon). January 22, 1984. p. 1A.
  44. ^ "Second UO wrestler dies". Eugene Register-Guard. (Oregon). January 24, 1984. p. 1A.
  45. ^ "Letters of Note: What a world". lettersofnote.com. Retrieved December 14, 2014.
  46. ^ Schmeltzer, Michael (March 7, 1984). "Kesey: An author and activist father". Spokesman-Review. (Spokane, Washington). p. 17.
  47. ^ Kesey, Ken (1984). "Remembering Jed Kesey". Whole Earth Catalogue. Co-Evolutionary Quarterly. Archived from the original on September 18, 2015.
  48. ^ Grateful Dead (October 31, 1991), Grateful Dead Live at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum on 1991-10-31, retrieved July 16, 2017. Track 13, starting at about :35.
  49. ^ Mortenson, Eric (February 24, 1988). "Keseys donate bus for UO wrestlers". Eugene Register-Guard. (Oregon). p. 1B.
  50. ^ "Kesey donates bus to son's university". Ocala Star-Banner. (Florida). February 25, 1988. p. 2A.
  51. ^ Leighton, Ken (July 8, 1994). "Merry pranksters Jambay trip back to San Diego beach". The Californian. p. 62. Retrieved August 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.
  52. ^ "Intrepid Trips". intrepidtrips.com. May 15, 2001. Archived from the original on May 15, 2001. Retrieved August 17, 2020.
  53. ^ "The Closing Of Winterland" (DVD). Shout! Factory. Retrieved January 30, 2018.
  54. ^ "August 1997". Phish.com. Phish. Retrieved November 4, 2016.
  55. ^ JC Haywire (December 2, 2012), Ken Kesey Commencement Address, The Evergreen State College, archived from the original on December 11, 2021, retrieved July 16, 2017
  56. ^ "Evergreen State College Archives: Student Affairs: Enrollment Services: Commencement Exercise : Commencement Speeches 1972–". archives.evergreen.edu. Retrieved July 16, 2017.
  57. ^ "Ken Kesey On Misconceptions Of Counterculture". NPR. August 12, 2011. Retrieved August 4, 2017.
  58. ^ "Gerry (2002)". IMDb.
  59. ^ Martin, Blank (January 19, 2010). "Selected Bibliography for Ken Kesey". Literary Kicks. Retrieved December 14, 2014.
  60. ^ Twister : a ritual reality in three-quarters plus overtime if necessary in SearchWorks catalog. Stanford Libraries:SearchWorks catalog. 1994. Retrieved February 12, 2018.

Further reading

  • Ronald Gregg Billingsley, The Artistry of Ken Kesey. PhD dissertation. Eugene, OR: University of Oregon, 1971.
  • Dedria Bryfonski, Mental illness in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2010.
  • Rick Dodgson, It's All Kind of Magic: The Young Ken Kesey. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013.
  • Robert Faggen, "Ken Kesey, The Art of 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 Inside History of the Grateful Dead. Broadway Books, 2002.
  • Tim Owen, "Remembering Ken Kesey", Cosmik Debris Magazine, November 10, 2001.
  • 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's One 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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