Portal:Oregon/Selected biography/15

Ken Kesey (1935–2001) was an American author, best known for his novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and as a counter-cultural figure. He is sometimes considered a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. He was born in Colorado and grew up in Springfield, Oregon. After high school he graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree from the journalism school, before receiving a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship and moving on to Stanford University. At Stanford he volunteered for the CIA's Project MKULTRA and was exposed to a variety of drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, and DMT. These experiences would contribute to his writings. Kesey's first book was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, published in 1962. When the publication of his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, required his presence in New York in 1964, 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" or Further. This trip, described in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (and later in Kesey's own screenplay "The Further Inquiry") was the group's attempt to create art out of everyday life. In New York, Cassady introduced Kesey to Jack Kerouac and to Allen Ginsberg, who in turn introduced them to Timothy Leary. Sometimes a Great Notion was made into a 1971 film starring Paul Newman; it was nominated for two Academy Awards. In 1966, Kesey was arrested for possession of marijuana and eventually spent five months in jail. He later returned to Oregon, where he lived the rest of his life. Kesey died on November 10, 2001, following an operation for liver cancer.