Ken Kesey

Ken Elton Kesey (1935–2001) was born on 17 September 1935 in La Junta, Colorado, and grew up in Springfield, Oregon, where his father ran a dairy cooperative. He was a champion high-school wrestler, a fraternity man at the University of Oregon, and an aspiring actor — a background almost comically far from the literary avant-garde into which he would shortly plunge.

Life and Career

In 1958 Kesey enrolled in the creative writing programme at Stanford University, where he studied under Wallace Stegner and Malcolm Cowley alongside Larry McMurtry and Wendell Berry. To earn money, he volunteered for government-sponsored experiments with psychoactive drugs — LSD, mescaline, psilocybin — at the Menlo Park Veterans’ Hospital. He also took a job as a night attendant on the hospital’s psychiatric ward. These two experiences — acid and the asylum — produced One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

The novel, published by Viking in 1962, is narrated by Chief Bromden, a half-Native American patient who pretends to be deaf and mute, and tells the story of Randle Patrick McMurphy’s doomed rebellion against the tyrannical Nurse Ratched. It was an immediate success and became a defining text of the 1960s — an allegory of the individual against institutional authority that spoke to the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the emerging counterculture.

Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), Kesey’s second novel, is a far more ambitious work: a multi-viewpoint narrative about the Stamper family, Oregon loggers locked in a labour dispute, told with Faulknerian complexity and set against the relentless rain and rivers of the Pacific Northwest. It was less commercially successful but is increasingly regarded as the more accomplished novel.

After Sometimes a Great Notion, Kesey famously declared that he was done with writing and would pursue “the act itself” — meaning the psychedelic experience as a form of direct consciousness. In 1964 he and the Merry Pranksters embarked on a cross-country bus trip in a painted school bus named “Furthur,” driven by Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty of Kerouac’s On the Road). The trip was immortalised in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968).

Kesey was arrested for marijuana possession in 1965, fled to Mexico, returned, served five months in jail, and retreated to a farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon. He published sporadically thereafter — Demon Box (1986, essays and stories), Sailor Song (1992), Last Go Round (1994, co-written with Ken Babbs) — but never produced another major novel. He died of liver cancer on 10 November 2001.

Major Works and Themes

Kesey’s two major novels share a preoccupation with the conflict between individual vitality and institutional control. McMurphy’s rebellion against the Combine — the dehumanizing machinery of modern society — is echoed in Hank Stamper’s refusal to join the loggers’ strike in Sometimes a Great Notion. Both novels celebrate stubborn, physical, almost recklessly courageous men who refuse to submit.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) works brilliantly on multiple levels: as a psychiatric thriller, as a political allegory, and as a mythic narrative (McMurphy as a Christ figure who sacrifices himself to liberate the inmates). Chief Bromden’s narrative voice — fractured, visionary, haunted — gives the novel a depth that the 1975 Milos Forman film, great as it is, necessarily simplifies.

Sometimes a Great Notion (1964) is Kesey’s technical tour de force: multiple narrators, shifting tenses, streams of consciousness that flow into one another like the Oregon rivers that dominate the landscape. It is one of the great American regional novels, a book that captures the physical reality of the Pacific Northwest with an intensity matched only by Raymond Carver’s shorter fiction.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Cuckoo’s Nest was a cultural phenomenon — the novel, the Broadway play starring Kirk Douglas, and the 1975 film (which won all five major Academy Awards) made it one of the most widely known American novels of the twentieth century. Its influence on the antipsychiatry movement and on popular conceptions of institutional authority is enormous.

Kesey’s decision to stop writing at the height of his powers has been a source of regret for literary critics ever since. He is often bracketed with other two-book wonders — Ralph Ellison, Harper Lee — though Sometimes a Great Notion alone would have established him as a major novelist.

Key Works

• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)
• Sometimes a Great Notion (1964)
• Demon Box (1986)
• Sailor Song (1992)

Collecting Kesey

Ken Kesey is actively collected, with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest being one of the landmark postwar American first editions.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962, Viking Press, New York) is Kesey’s first book and the essential collectible. The first edition is in green cloth with the original pictorial dust jacket. Key identification: “First published in 1962” stated on the copyright page. Fine copies in the first-state jacket bring $5,000–$20,000. The jacket is critical to value; without it, first editions bring $300–$800. Signed copies command a substantial premium — Kesey was a willing signer but copies from the 1962 first printing with an early signature are scarce.

Sometimes a Great Notion (1964, Viking Press, New York) first editions in the jacket bring $500–$2,000. It is undervalued relative to Cuckoo’s Nest and represents one of the better values in postwar American fiction collecting.

Kesey’s connection to the Merry Pranksters and the counterculture has created a secondary collecting market for ephemera: Acid Test posters, Grateful Dead concert materials associated with the Pranksters, and copies of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test inscribed by both Wolfe and Kesey are particularly sought after. The painted bus “Furthur” itself has become an icon, and photographs, memorabilia, and associated materials are collected.

Later works — Demon Box, Sailor Song, Last Go Round — are readily available as first editions at $25–$100.