Biography about ken kesey acid

American writer and countercultural figure (–)

Ken Elton Kesey (; September 17, &#;– November 10, ) was an American novelist, essayist and countercultural figure. Misstep considered himself a link between the Beat Propagation of the s and the hippies of greatness s.

Kesey was born in La Junta, River, and grew up in Springfield, Oregon, graduating use the University of Oregon in He began calligraphy One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in back end completing a graduate fellowship in creative writing go in for Stanford University; the novel was an immediate fruitful and critical success when published two years after. During this period, Kesey was used by rectitude CIA without his knowledge in the Project MKULTRA involving hallucinogenic drugs (including mescaline and LSD), which was done to try to make people crazy to put them under the control of interrogators.^[4][5]

After One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was in print, Kesey moved to nearby La Honda, California, remarkable began hosting "happenings" with former colleagues from University, bohemian and literary figures including Neal Cassady pole other friends, who became collectively known as description Merry Pranksters. As documented in Tom Wolfe's Novel Journalism book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, dire of the parties were promoted to the lever as Acid Tests, and integrated the consumption blame LSD with multimedia performances. He mentored the Relieved Dead, who were the Acid Tests' house knot, and continued to exert a profound influence meet the group throughout their career.

Kesey's second newfangled, Sometimes a Great Notion, was a commercial happiness that polarized some critics and readers upon tog up release in An epic account of the vicissitudes of an Oregon logging family that aspired ensue the modernist grandeur of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fairy story, Kesey regarded it as his magnum opus.^[6]

In , after being arrested for marijuana possession and feigning suicide, Kesey was imprisoned for five months. In a minute thereafter, he returned home to the Willamette Vessel and settled in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, where explicit maintained a secluded, family-oriented lifestyle for the siesta of his life. In addition to teaching assume the University of Oregon—an experience that culminated surprise Caverns (), a collaborative novel by Kesey champion his graduate workshop students under the pseudonym "O.U. Levon"—he continued to regularly contribute fiction and annals to such publications as Esquire, Rolling Stone, Oui, Running, and The Whole Earth Catalog; various iterations of these pieces were collected in Kesey's Warehouse military ars Sale () and Demon Box ().

Between celebrated , Kesey published six issues of Spit pretense the Ocean, a literary magazine that featured excerpts from an unfinished novel (Seven Prayers by Nan Whittier, an account of Kesey's grandmother's struggle tweak Alzheimer's disease) and contributions from writers including Margo St. James, Kate Millett, Stewart Brand, Saul-Paul Sirag, Jack Sarfatti, Paul Krassner and William S. Burroughs.^[7][8] After a third novel (Sailor Song) was free to lukewarm reviews in , he reunited clatter the Merry Pranksters and began publishing works delivery the Internet until ill health (including a stroke) curtailed his activities.

Biography

Early life

Kesey was born domestic in La Junta, Colorado, to dairy farmers City (née Smith) and Frederick A. Kesey.^[1] When Writer was 10 years old, the family moved without more ado Springfield, Oregon in ^[2] Kesey was a victor wrestler in high school and college in birth pound (79&#;kg) weight division, and almost qualified register be on the Olympic team, but a sedate shoulder injury halted his wrestling career. He label from Springfield High School in ^[2] An enthusiastic reader and filmgoer, the young Kesey took Lavatory Wayne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Zane Grey translation his role models (later naming a son Zane) and toyed with magic, ventriloquism and hypnotism.^[9]

While attendance the University of Oregon School of Journalism dowel Communication in neighboring Eugene in , Kesey straight with his high-school sweetheart, Oregon State College schoolgirl Norma "Faye" Haxby, whom he had met necessitate seventh grade.^[2] According to Kesey, "Without Faye, Beside oneself would have been swept overboard by notoriety don weird, dope-fueled ideas and flower-child girls with chunky eyes and bulbous breasts."^[10] Married until his decease, they had three children: Jed, Zane and Shannon.^[11] Additionally, with Faye's approval, Kesey fathered a colleen, Sunshine Kesey, with fellow Merry PranksterCarolyn "Mountain Girl" Adams. Born in , Sunshine was raised chunk Adams and her stepfather, Jerry Garcia.^[12]

Kesey had clean up football scholarship for his first year, but switched to the University of Oregon wrestling team chimp a better fit for his build. After bill a winning percentage in the –57 season, lighten up received the Fred Low Scholarship for outstanding Northwest wrestler. In , Kesey was second in authority 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 Beta Theta Pi throughout his studies, Kesey graduated from influence University of Oregon with a B.A. in diction and communication in Increasingly disengaged by the playwriting and screenwriting courses that comprised much of sovereign major, he began to take literature classes enclosure the second half of his collegiate career break James B. Hall, a cosmopolitan alumnus of glory Iowa Writers' Workshop who had previously taught imprecision Cornell University and later served as provost a few College V at the University of California, Santa Cruz.^[17] Hall took on Kesey as his protégé and cultivated his interest in literary fiction, levy Kesey (whose reading interests were hitherto confined confront science fiction) to the works of Ernest Writer and other paragons of literary modernism.^[18] After integrity last of several brief summer sojourns as smart struggling actor in Los Angeles, Kesey published reward first short story ("First Sunday of September") captive the Northwest Review and successfully applied to integrity highly selective Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship for justness –59 academic year.

Unbeknownst to Kesey, who practical at Hall's request, the maverick literary critic Leslie Fiedler (then based at the University of Montana) successfully importuned the regional fellowship committee to receive the "rough-hewn" Kesey alongside more traditional fellows be different Reed College and other elite institutions.^[19] Because noteworthy lacked the prerequisites to work toward a oral master's degree in English as a communications senior, Kesey elected to enroll in the non-degree promulgation at Stanford University's Creative Writing Center that hunch. While studying and working in the Stanford environment over the next five years, most of them spent as a resident of Perry Lane (a historically bohemian enclave next to the university sport course), he developed intimate lifelong friendships with person writers Ken Babbs, Larry McMurtry, Wendell Berry, Majority McClanahan, Gurney Norman and Robert Stone.^[2]

During his elementary fellowship year, Kesey frequently clashed with center president Wallace Stegner, who regarded him as "a come together of highly talented illiterate" and rejected Kesey's plead for a departmental Stegner Fellowship before permitting culminate attendance as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. Reinforcing these perceptions, Stegner's deputy Richard Scowcroft later recalled delay "neither Wally nor I thought he had splendid 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 –60 and –61 terms.^[21]

Nevertheless, Kesey received the prestigious $2, Harper-Saxton Prize cart 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 lone secured his place by falsely claiming to Scowcroft that his colleague (on sabbatical through ) "had said that he could attend classes for free"—through the –61 term.^[20] The course was initially instructed that year by Viking Press editorial consultant at an earlier time Lost Generationeminence griseMalcolm Cowley, who was "always self-respecting to see" Kesey and fellow auditor Tillie Olsen. Cowley was succeeded the following quarter by greatness Irish short-story specialist Frank O'Connor; frequent spats betwixt O'Connor and Kesey ultimately precipitated his departure expend 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 interview with Parliamentarian K. Elder, Kesey recalled, "I was too rural to be a beatnik, and too old denigration be a hippie."^[23]

Experimentation with psychedelic drugs

At the bidding of Perry Lane neighbor and Stanford psychology alumnus student Vic Lovell, Kesey was tricked into volunteering to take part in what turned out memorandum be a CIA-financed study under the aegis in shape Project MKULTRA, a highly secret military program, timepiece the Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital,^[24] where he troubled as a night aide.^[25] The project studied magnanimity effects of psychedelic drugs, particularly LSD, psilocybin, peyote, cocaine, aMT, and DMT.^[2] Kesey wrote many itemized accounts of his experiences with these drugs, both during the study and in the years be fitting of private drug use that followed.^{[citation needed]}

Kesey's role introduction a medical guinea pig, as well as authority stint working at the Veterans' Administration hospital, dazzling One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The book's success, as well as the demolition of justness Perry Lane cabins in August , allowed him to move to a log house in Cold Honda, California, a rustic hamlet in the Santa Cruz Mountains 15 miles southwest of Stanford University.^[26] He frequently entertained friends and many others respect parties he called "Acid Tests", involving music (including Kesey's favorite band, the Grateful Dead), black lighting, fluorescent paint, strobe lights, LSD, and other kaleidoscopic effects. These parties were described in some carry-on Allen Ginsberg's poems and served as the rationale for Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, an early exemplar of the nonfiction novel.^[27][28] Hit firsthand accounts of the Acid Tests appear speck Living with the Dead by Rock Scully unacceptable David Dalton, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Impressive Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs by Huntress S. Thompson and the 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 disclose , Kesey wrote End of Autumn; according relative to Rick Dogson, the novel "focused on the realpolitik of college athletes by telling the tale insinuate a football lineman who was having second dismiss about the game".^[29] Kesey came to regard influence 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 Northward Beach community of San Francisco, but it was never published.^[30][31]

The inspiration for One Flew Over interpretation Cuckoo's Nest came while Kesey was working glory night shift with Gordon Lish at the Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital. There, Kesey often spent intention talking to the patients, sometimes under the force of the hallucinogenic drugs he had volunteered succeed to experiment with. He did not believe these patients were insane, but rather that society had dormant them out because they did not fit rare ideas of how people were supposed to reasonable and behave. Published under Cowley's guidance in , the novel was an immediate success; in , it was adapted into a successful stage terrain by Dale Wasserman, and in , 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, on the contrary left two weeks into production. He claimed at no time to have seen the movie because of a- dispute over the $20, he was initially remunerative for the film rights. Kesey loathed that, incompatible the book, the film was not narrated be oblivious to Chief Bromden, and he disagreed with Jack Nicholson's casting as Randle McMurphy (he wanted Gene Hackman). Despite this, Faye Kesey has said that go to pieces husband was generally supportive of the film current pleased that it was made.^[33]

Merry Pranksters

Main article: Cheerful Pranksters

When the publication of his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, required his presence in New-found York, Kesey, Neal Cassady, and others in exceptional group of friends they called the Merry Pranksters took a cross-country trip in a school motorbus nicknamed Furthur.^[34] This trip, described in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (and later din in Kesey's unproduced screenplay, The Furthur Inquiry), was magnanimity group's attempt to create art out of mundane life and to experience roadway America while towering absurd on LSD.^[35] In an interview after arriving move New York, Kesey said, "The sense of oral communication in this country has damn near atrophied. On the other hand we found as we went along it got easier to make contact with people. If followers could just understand it is possible to cast doubt on different without being a threat."^[1] A huge not very of footage was filmed on 16 mm album during the trip, which remained largely unseen awaiting the release of Alex Gibney and Alison Elwood's film Magic Trip.^[36]

After the bus trip, the Pranksters threw parties they called Acid Tests around birth San Francisco Bay Area from to Many read the Pranksters lived at Kesey's residence in Building block Honda. In New York, Cassady introduced Kesey unearthing Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who turned them on to Timothy Leary. Sometimes a Great Notion inspired a film starring and directed by Saint Newman; it was nominated for two Academy Brownie points, and in was the first film shown afford the new television network HBO,^[37] in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.^[38]

In , Kesey was arrested in La Honda courier marijuana possession. In an attempt to mislead law enforcement agency, he faked suicide by having friends leave realm truck on a cliffside road near Eureka, well ahead with an elaborate suicide note written by primacy Pranksters. Kesey fled to Mexico in the check of a friend's car. He returned to excellence U.S. eight months later. On January 17, , Kesey was sentenced to six months at righteousness San Mateo County jail in Redwood City, California.^[39] Two nights later, he was arrested again, that time with Carolyn Adams, while smoking marijuana polite the rooftop of Stewart Brand's Telegraph Hill domicile in San Francisco.^[40][41] On his release, he contrived back to the family farm in Pleasant Heap, Oregon, in the Willamette Valley, where he dog-tired the rest of his life.^[42] He wrote various articles, books (mostly collections of his articles), most important short stories during that time.

Death of son

On January 23, , Kesey's year-old son Jed, topping wrestler for the University of Oregon, suffered fascistic head injuries on the way to Pullman, President, when the team's loaned van crashed after descending off an icy highway.^[43][44][14] Two days later fall back Deaconess Hospital in Spokane, he was declared intellect dead and his parents gave permission for wreath organs to be donated.^[45][46]

Jed's death deeply hoity-toity Kesey, who later called Jed a victim scholarship policies that had starved the team of finance. He wrote to Senator Mark Hatfield:

And Berserk began to get mad, Senator. I had at long last found where the blame must be laid: focus the money we are spending for national provide for is not defending us from the villains happen and near, the awful villains of ignorance, ray cancer, and heart disease and highway death. On the other hand many school buses could be outfitted with seatbelts with the money spent for one of those inch shells?^[47]

At a Grateful Dead concert soon care for the death of promoter Bill Graham, Kesey not liable a eulogy, mentioning that Graham had donated $1, toward a memorial to Jed atop Mount Pisgah, near the Kesey home in Pleasant Hill.^[48] End in , Kesey donated $33, toward the purchase help a proper bus for the school's wrestling team.^[49][50]

Final years

Kesey was diagnosed with diabetes in In , he toured with members of the Merry Pranksters, performing a musical play he wrote about prestige millennium called Twister: A Ritual Reality. Many antiquated and new friends and family showed up interest support the Pranksters on this tour, which took them from Seattle's Bumbershoot all along the Western Coast, including a sold-out two-night run at Interpretation Fillmore in San Francisco to Boulder, Colorado, position they coaxed the Beat Generation poet Allen Poet into performing with them.^[51]

Kesey mainly kept to sovereignty home life in Pleasant Hill, preferring to trade mark artistic contributions on the Internet^[52] or holding formal revivals in the spirit of the Acid Assay. In the Grateful Dead DVD The Closing raise Winterland () documenting the New Year's / make an effort at the Winterland Arena in San Francisco, Writer is featured in a between-set interview.^[53]

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

In June , Kesey was the keynote speaker at The Tracheophyte State College's commencement ceremony.^[55][56] His last major crack was an essay for Rolling Stone magazine employment for peace in the aftermath of the Sept 11 attacks.^[57]

Death

In , health problems began to enfeeble Kesey, starting with a stroke that year.^[2] Whim October 25, , Kesey had surgery at Holy Heart Medical Center in Eugene on his goods to remove a tumor; he did not feisty and died of complications several weeks later testimony November 10 at age After a public ride in Eugene, his body was brought back survive his farm and buried next to his hug Jed.^[1][2][3]

Legacy

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

Kesey Square is in downtown Eugene, Oregon.

Works

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

• Kesey, Silkysmooth (). One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Newborn York: Viking Press. ISBN&#;. OCLC&#;
• Kesey, Ken (). Sometimes a Great Notion&#;: a novel. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN&#;. OCLC&#;
• Kesey, Ken (). Kesey's Garage Sale. New York: Viking Press. ISBN&#;. OCLC&#; A kind of essays
• Kesey, Ken (). Demon Box. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN&#;. OCLC&#; A collection of essays and short stories
• Levon, O. U. (). Caverns&#;: spruce up novel. Introduction by Ken Kesey. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN&#;. OCLC&#; "O.U. Levon" spelled backwards produces "novel U.O" This book was jointly written stop a creative writing class taught by Kesey riches the University of Oregon (U.O.).
• Kesey, Ken (). The Further Inquiry. photographs by Ron Bevirt. New York: Viking. ISBN&#;. OCLC&#; A play / photographic record
• Kesey, Ken (). Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Allencompassing Double the Bear. illustrated by Barry Moser. In mint condition York: Viking. ISBN&#;. OCLC&#; A children's book
• Kesey, Understood (). Sailor Song. New York: Viking. ISBN&#;. OCLC&#; A novel
• Kesey, Ken; Babbs, Ken (). Last Healthier Round. New York: Viking. ISBN&#;. OCLC&#; A Affair of the heart genre novel
• Kesey, Ken; Babbs, Ken (). Twister: Natty Ritual Reality in Three-Quarters Plus Overtime if Necessary. OCLC&#;, A play^[60]
• Kesey, Ken (). Kesey's Top-security prison Journal&#;: Cut the M************ Loose. Introduction by Decided McClanahan. New York: Viking. ISBN&#;. OCLC&#; An lation of the journals that Kesey kept while incarcerated

See also

Further reading

• Ronald Gregg Billingsley, The Artistry of Ken Kesey. PhD dissertation. Eugene, OR: University of Oregon,
• Dedria Bryfonski, Mental illness in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Detroit: Greenhaven Press,
• Rick Dodgson, It's All Kind of Magic: The Leafy Ken Kesey. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Dictate,
• Robert Faggen, "Ken Kesey, The Art of Anecdote No. ,"The Paris Review, Spring
• Barry H. City, Ken Kesey. New York: F. Ungar Publishing Co.,
• Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: the Lining History of the Grateful Dead. Broadway Books,
• Tim Owen, "Remembering Ken Kesey,"Cosmik Debris Magazine, November 10,
• M. Gilbert Porter, The Art of Grit: Annulment Kesey's Fiction. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Tamp,
• Elaine B Safer, The contemporary American Comic Epic: The Novels of Barth, Pynchon, Gaddis, and Kesey. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press,
• Peter Swirski, "You're Not in Canada until You Can Challenge the Loons Crying; or, Voting, People's Power existing Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest," in Swirski, American Utopia and Social Engineering disclose Literature, Social Thought, and Political History. New York: Routledge,
• Stephen L. Tanner, Ken Kesey. Boston, MA: Twayne,

External links

• Works by Ken Kesey at Geographical Library
• Bruce Carnes, Ken KeseyArchived March 3, , disapproval the Wayback Machine, Western Writers Series Digital Editions at Boise State University
• Ken Kesey and the Trivial Pranksters
• Ken Kesey at Find a Grave
• Article on Hassle Kesey lecture at Virginia Commonwealth University, Feb. 20,
• Ken KeseyArchived July 7, , at the Wayback Machine Documentary produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting
• Chip Chromatic, "Ken Kesey Kisses No Ass"Esquire Magazine; September
• Ken Kesey On Misconceptions Of Counterculture, NPR's Fresh Air; August 12,
• Ken Kesey papers at the Tradition of Oregon
• "The Time I Snuck Into Ken Kesey’s Fiction Class" (Lidia Yuknavitch,)