History Minutes: Ken Kesey (1935-2001)

Ken Kesey (1935-2001) // ba019652, OrHi 105106

Ken Kesey was one of Oregon’s most critically acclaimed and controversial authors.  He published One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1962 and the quintessential Oregon novel Sometimes a Great Notion in 1964.  Both novels explore what Kesey saw as the conflict between modern industrial society and individuality, a struggle between conformity and freedom.

Kesey was born on September 17, 1935, in La Junta, Colorado.  He and his family moved to Springfield, Oregon in 1946. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism in 1957, and attended Stanford University’s creative writing program where he studied with Wallace Stegner.

Considered a founding father of the 1960s counterculture, Kesey and a group known as the Merry Pranksters traveled across the country in a day-glo school bus named "Further."  The Pranksters were the inspiration for Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, published in 1968.

In 1965, after a short stint in jail for drug use, Kesey moved to a farm near Eugene to raise his family.  In 1975 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest became an Oscar- winning film, and Kesey briefly worked as a professor of writing at the University of Oregon.  His third novel, Sailor Song, was published in 1992.  Kesey lived in Pleasant Hill, Oregon until his death on November 10, 2001.