Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey 1935 – 2001Information for this presentation was taken from Wikipedia.

Ken Kesey

Kesey was an American author, best known for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962),[1] and as a counter-cultural figure who considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. "I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie."

Early Life

Kesey attended the University of Oregon's School of Journalism, where he received a degree in speech and communication in 1957. He was awarded a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship in 1958 to enroll in the creative writing program at Stanford University, which he did the following year.[4] While at Stanford, he began the manuscript that would become One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Experimentation with psychoactive drugs

At Stanford in 1959, Kesey volunteered to take part in a CIA-financed study named Project MKULTRA at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital where he worked as a night aide.[8] The project studied the effects of psychoactive drugs, particularly LSD, on people.[4] Kesey wrote many detailed accounts of his experiences with these drugs, both during the Project MKULTRA study and in the years of private experimentation that followed. Kesey's role as a medical guinea pig, as well as his stint working at a state veterans' hospital, inspired him to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1962. The success of this book, as well as the sale of his residence at Stanford, allowed him to move to La Honda, California, in the mountains south of San Francisco. He frequently entertained friends and many others with parties he called "Acid Tests" involving music (such as Kesey's favorite band, The Warlocks, later known as the Grateful Dead), black lights, fluorescent paint, strobes and other "psychedelic" effects, and, of course, LSD. These parties were noted in some of the literary works of the time.

Merry PrankstersWhen the publication of his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion in 1964 required his presence in New York, 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".[9] 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. After the bus trip, the Pranksters threw parties they called Acid Tests around the San Francisco area from 1965-1966. Many of the Pranksters lived at Kesey's residence in La Honda. In New York, Cassady introduced Kesey to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who then turned them on to Timothy Leary.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/AcidTest.jpg

Legal TroubleKesey was arrested for possession of marijuana in 1965. In an attempt to mislead police, he faked suicide by having friends leave his truck on a cliffside road near Eureka, along with an elaborate suicide note, written by the Pranksters. Kesey fled to Mexico in the back of a friend's car. When he returned to the United States eight months later, Kesey was arrested and sent to the San Mateo County jail in Redwood City, California, for five months where he was introduced to a highly recommended San Francisco lawyer, Richard Potack who specialized in marijuana cultivation. On his release, he moved back to the family farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, in the Willamette Valley, where he spent the rest of his life.[10] He wrote many articles, books (mostly collections of his articles), and short stories during that time.

Later Years• On August 14, 1997, Kesey and his Pranksters attended a Phish concert in Darien

Lake, New York. After making a somewhat mystical appearance in the parking lot before the show, Kesey and the Pranksters appeared onstage with the band and performed a dance-trance-jam session involving several characters from The Wizard of Oz and Frankenstein. Kesey kept asking, "Where have all the Bozos gone? To the Phish concert, and the Further Festival." Trey Anastasio was quoted as the Pranksters exited, "That's what happens when you do too much acid 30 years later." The band then performed the song "Camel Walk", with a groove that has become known as the "Pranksters Jam".

• In June 2001, Kesey was invited and accepted as the keynote speaker at the annual commencement of The Evergreen State College. His last major work was an essay for Rolling Stone magazine calling for peace in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

• Kesey was diagnosed with diabetes in 1992. In 1997, health problems began to take their toll, starting with a stroke that year.[4] On October 25, 2001 Kesey had surgery on his liver to remove a tumor.[4] He never recovered from the operation and died of complications on November 10, 2001, aged 66.[4]