Ken Kesey

American · 1935 to 2001

Born Kenneth Elton Kesey on September 17, 1935, in La Junta, Colorado, to dairy farmers Geneva and Fred Kesey, he was raised from the age of ten in Springfield, Oregon, where his father ran a creamery. A champion wrestler at Springfield High and the University of Oregon, he nearly made the 1960 Olympic team before a shoulder injury closed that route. He took a creative-writing fellowship at Stanford in 1958 and, working night shifts as an aide on the psychiatric ward at the Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital, volunteered for what turned out to be a CIA-funded Project MKULTRA study of LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin. The voices he heard on the ward, and the chemicals he swallowed off it, fed the novel he began in 1960. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), narrated by the feigning-mute Chief Bromden, made him famous at twenty-six. Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), his sprawling Oregon logging saga, he considered his finest book. Then came the painted bus Furthur, the Merry Pranksters, the Acid Tests, the mentorship of the Grateful Dead, and Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which fixed Kesey in the public mind as the hinge between Beat and hippie. Arrested for marijuana possession in 1965, he faked a suicide, fled to Mexico, was caught, and served five months. He returned to Pleasant Hill, Oregon, raised cattle, taught at the university, and largely withdrew from celebrity. He died on November 10, 2001, at sixty-six, from complications after liver surgery, and was buried on the family farm beside his son Jed, who had been killed in a van crash in 1984.