Ken Kesey (1935-2001). Biography and creative work

Ken Elton Kesey was born September 17, 1935, to the dairy farmers Fred and Geneva Smith Kesey. Though he was born in La Junta, Colorado, his family moved to Springfield, Oregon, just outside Eugene, in 1946, and the landscape of the Pacific Northwest became the backdrop for most of Kesey’s life, as well as his writings. In his greatest works, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) and Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), the Oregon setting constitutes not just the location but also the landscape of the characters’ life experience.

Today Kesey is considered not just one of the principal writers of that American region but also of the United States as a whole. His capacity to represent universal human struggles and emotions eloquently and humorously has allowed him to transcend the label of a regional writer, and his major novels are known as some of the greatest to be written during the 1960s.

Kesey and his brother, Chuck, spent a lot of time outside, exploring and hunting in the forests of the Willamette Valley. Kesey also enjoyed comic books and adventure stories, particularly those of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Zane Gray. The latter would even one day become his son’s namesake. Kesey attended public schools in Springfield, where he participated on the boxing, wrestling, and football teams and was voted “most likely to succeed” by his high school graduating class. He went on to the University of Oregon, where he continued his wrestling career, almost qualifying for the Olympics. He also became active in theater and was a member of a fraternity. Kesey graduated in 1957 with a bachelor’s degree in speech and communications.

During his junior year Kesey married his high school sweetheart, Faye Haxby, and shortly after his graduation, they moved together to Los Angeles. Kesey spent a year playing bit roles in Hollywood films and composing his first and still unpublished novel “End of Autumn,” about college athletics. He then entered the graduate level writing program at Stanford on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship; there he studied under Frank O’Connor, Malcolm Cowley, and Wallace Stegner, alongside blooming writers like Tillie Olsen, Ernest Gaines, and Ed McClanahan, among others. He spent much of his time working on another unpublished novel, “Zoo,” which documented San Francisco’s bohemian North Beach community. While at Stanford, Kesey lived on the infamous Perry Lane, the hub of Palo Alto’s budding bohemian subculture. There, in 1959, he met Vik Lovell, a psychology graduate student who encouraged him to participate in experiments of “psychomimetic” (imitating a psychotic state) drugs at the Veterans Hospital at Menlo Park, California. There Kesey was introduced to drugs like psilocybin, mescaline, and peyote, but most notably, to LSD.

In 1961 Kesey took a job as a night guard on the psychiatric ward of the same hospital. Forever changed by his experiences with drugs, Kesey would go to work under the influence of hallucinogens, which gave him the feeling of being able to see into the faces of the patients on a higher level of consciousness. During one such hallucination, Kesey saw the face of an American Indian, and this vision became the basis for the narrator in his first major novel, Chief Bromden in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

The novel takes place in a mental hospital outside Portland, Oregon, where the schizophrenic Bromden has been hospitalized for more than 15 years. Bromden, who pretends to be a deaf and mute to avoid confrontation with the hospital staff, is forever changed by the appearance of Randle Patrick McMurphy, a rambunctious and dynamic convict who has himself committed in order to avoid labor on a work farm and eventually falls victim to a lobotomy by the hospital staff and a mercy killing at the hands of Bromden. Kesey’s experiences both with mind-altering substances and with an actual mental institution heavily influenced the novel, as did the work of the writers of the Beat generation, particularly Jack Kerouac. While Kesey’s style differs dramatically from Ker- ouac’s, Kesey admired Kerouac’s ability to create a rhythm that moved smoothly through different ideas, as well as his focus on lived experience.

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, published in February 1962, was an instant success, earning Kesey both critical acclaim and popular culture credibility. His popularity soared to greater heights with its translation into a play version in 1963 and even more with the release of the five-time Academy Award winning film version in 1975 that won five Academy Awards, though Kesey denounced the film because it lacked Bromden’s narration. With the profits from the novel, Kesey moved briefly with his family to Oregon, where he began researching his next novel. He then returned to California, and after Perry Lane was sold to a developer, Kesey bought property and a house in La Honda, California. This house later became the site of Kesey’s infamous gatherings of diverse individuals, from Beat writers to the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, who together engaged in hallucinogenic experiences and wild parties.

At the house in La Honda, Kesey also finished his second published novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, which was released in July 1964. The novel, about a logging family resisting unionization in small-town Oregon, was equal to One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest in quality but received less praise because of its inaccessibility and length (over 600 pages). As does Cuckoo’s Nest, the novel relies heavily on point of view, but it goes one step further as that point of view switches throughout the text, a style some readers found difficult. Also as its predecessor was, Sometimes a Great Notion was made into a film, the first film to be shown on HBO when the channel premiered in 1972. Though it boasted stars like Paul Newman and Henry Fonda and was approved by Kesey himself, the movie, like its novelistic counterpart, could not come close to matching the success of Cuckoo’s Nest.

The success of his novel, though, was not first on Kesey’s mind. In spring 1964, just after completing Sometimes a Great Notion, Kesey bought a 1939 International Harvester school bus, which he and his group of friends (who had dubbed themselves the “Merry Pranksters”) painted with psychedelic colors and named Further. In summer 1964, Kesey and the Pranksters drove cross-country in the bus, piloted by the Beat icon Neal Cassady, on a journey from California to New York, which Ed McClanahan later called America’s “first national contact high.” They also shot about 40 hours of film for a project they called simply “The Movie,” which would later be called Intrepid Traveler and His Merry Band of Pranksters Look for a Kool Place.

After returning from the trek, many of the Merry Pranksters took up residence at or around Kesey’s house in La Honda and engaged in “happenings” that included music, screenings of “The Movie,” and consumption of LSD. At future gatherings, LSD was distributed freely in what the Pranksters called “acid tests,” as immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s infamous nonfiction novel that documents this period: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968). As the antics of the Pranksters escalated, though, Kesey began to experience problems with the authorities, as well as conflicts within his own subcultural group, now more firmly solidified as the nascent “hippie” movement.

In April 1965, Kesey was arrested for possession of marijuana, and during the following year of trials and appeals, he delved further and further into drug use. When speaking at an antiwar protest in Berkeley, California, he rambled so incoherently that he angered the audience and effectively ostracized himself from the large antiwar faction of the hippies. He also performed several of his large-scale “acid tests” at the rally, alienating him from academic LSD advocates such as Timothy Leary.

Kesey found himself not only in jeopardy with mainstream society but also isolated from antiestablishment society. On January 17, 1966, he was found guilty of an April 1965 marijuana charge, and two days later, while awaiting appeal, he was arrested again for possession of marijuana. Facing a possible five-year jail term, he decided instead to fake his suicide and flee to Mexico, where he was joined by Faye; their children, Jed, Zane, and Shannon; and some of his fellow Pranksters, including the 19-year-old Mountain Girl, who was then pregnant with Kesey’s daughter, Sunshine. He returned to the United States in September 1966 and was soon captured by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). After pleading nolo contendere to a charge of “knowingly being in a place where marijuana was kept,” Kesey served his two sentences concurrently, spending June to November 1967 at the San Mateo County Jail and the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Honor Camp. During his imprisonment, he composed elaborate journals, which were published posthumously as Kesey’s Jail Journal in 2003.

After his release, Kesey returned to the Willamette Valley of his childhood, as he moved with his family to a farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, which would be his home for the rest of his life. From March to June 1969, he and his family lived in London, where Kesey worked with the Beatles’ Apple Records on an unsuccessful recording project that featured authors reading their own work. Upon his return to the United States, he refused the Pranksters’ pleas to embark on a trip to the Woodstock festival, thus signifying his moving away from their wild ways and toward a life of farming and family.

At the time of his arrest, he expressed distrust with writing as an expressive form, and during the two decades from 1969 to 1989 he was productive intermittently. In 1971 he and Paul Krassner edited The Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog, and in 1973 he published Kesey’s Garage Sale, a compilation of his writing and that of his friends, which Kesey ironically titled as such because, as he wrote in the introduction, it was “a familiar maneuver that puts stale outmoded stored members of your ordinary household back into the economic flow of life as we know it today.” Notably, Garage Sale included Kesey’s screenplay Over the Border, a fictionalized account of his experiences as a fugitive in Mexico.

In 1974 Kesey began the roughly annual publication Spit in the Ocean, a collaboration of close friends that included his noteworthy Grandma Whittier stories. Later that year, Rolling Stone sent Kesey to Egypt to write five “dispatches” about his exploration of the pyramids. The following years, though, were difficult for Kesey both in his work and in his personal life, culminating in 1984 with the tragic death of his younger son, Jed, in a highway accident on a University of Oregon wrestling team trip. In August 1986, Kesey published Demon Box, a collection of mostly previously unpublished work (including the Rolling Stone articles), which he dedicated “To Jed / across the river / riding point.”

Over the course of three academic terms, from 1989 to 1990, Kesey worked with a group of 13 graduate students in the creative writing program at the University of Oregon to create Caverns, a collaborative mystery novel published under the pseudonym O. U. Levon, for “University of Oregon novel.” Although 1990 also marked the year of Kesey’s publication of The Further Inquiry, a screenplay, the completion of Caverns reignited Kesey’s career as a fiction writer, and he published his first new novel in several decades in 1992. Sailor Song, set in a 21st-century Alaskan village after much of the world has been wrecked by human abuse of the environment, was very poorly received, even prompting the New York Times Book Review writer Donald E. Westlake to comment, “Sailor Song does not make one particle of sense.” His final novel, prophetically titled Last Go Round (1994), did not win the favor of critics either. The 1990s also saw the publication of two children’s books by Kesey, Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear (1992) and The Sea Lion: A Story of the Cliff People (1995), as well as a play, Twister (1994).

Ken Kesey spent the last few years of his life in relative obscurity, making infrequent appearances at concerts and literary events. He and a fellow Prankster, Ken Babbs, maintained a Web site, IntrepidTrips.com, which Babbs continues to update today. In 2001, Kesey fell ill with liver cancer and in November underwent surgery to remove a tumor and a substantial portion of his liver. On November 10, he died of complications related to the surgery.

He was 66. A memorial service, overflowing with countercultural and literary comrades, was held in downtown Eugene, Oregon, on November 14. Though Kesey’s death was a blow, his legacy continues through his friends and his children, who continue to collaborate on projects like the restoration of Further. His contribution to the literary canon, too, will not be forgotten. His novels, as well as his revolutionary ideals, have left an indelible imprint on American culture.