Sometimes a Great Notion was published by the Viking Press, New York, on 22 July 1964, in a first printing of approximately 15,000 copies priced at $5.95. The novel was Kesey’s second, following the sensational success of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and it was a deliberate departure: where Cuckoo’s Nest was tight, parabolic, and focused on a single setting, Sometimes a Great Notion is vast, polyphonic, and technically ambitious — shifting viewpoints, multiple narrators, past and present braided together in a style that owes as much to Faulkner as to anyone.
The Novel
The Stamper family lives and logs along the Wakonda Auga River on the Oregon coast. Hank Stamper — the eldest son, powerful, stubborn, ferociously independent — runs the family logging operation. His father Henry, the patriarch, is a profane, indestructible old man who has spent his life defying the river and anyone who tells him what to do. When the local union calls a strike against the timber companies, the Stampers refuse to join. They will fill the company’s contract alone, by themselves, to spite the union, the town, and anyone who expects them to submit.
Into this situation comes Leland Stanford Stamper — Lee — Hank’s half-brother, a weak, intellectual, self-conscious young man from the East Coast who has returned to Wakonda ostensibly to help with the logging but actually to take revenge on Hank for sleeping with Lee’s mother. Lee’s arrival introduces a psychologically complex counterpoint to Hank’s physical vitality, and the novel becomes a study in two American types: the man of action and the man of thought, each inadequate alone.
The novel’s prose is extraordinary — lyrical, muscular, technically daring. Kesey shifts between first and third person, between present and past, between Hank’s consciousness, Lee’s consciousness, and the consciousness of the town. The river functions as a character: rising, threatening, and eventually flooding the Stamper homestead.
Collecting Sometimes a Great Notion
First edition (1964, Viking): Approximately 15,000 copies, $5.95.
Identification points:
- Viking Press colophon
- First printing stated
- Green cloth binding
- Dust jacket with forest illustration
Approximate market values:
- Fine/Fine in dust jacket: $1,500–$5,000
- Signed first edition: $3,000–$10,000
- Without jacket: $100–$300
Value trajectory: Moderate appreciation. The novel is less famous than Cuckoo’s Nest but has a devoted following, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. A 1971 Paul Newman film (Newman directed and starred as Hank) keeps it in the cultural consciousness. Kesey signed books freely at events throughout his career (he died in 2001), so signed copies are available but increasingly valued.
Kesey’s Forgotten Masterpiece
Many writers — Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Tom Robbins — have called Sometimes a Great Notion a greater novel than Cuckoo’s Nest. Its ambition is certainly larger: it attempts to capture an entire community, an entire landscape, an entire way of life. The novel’s commercial underperformance relative to Cuckoo’s Nest is partly explained by its difficulty — the shifting perspectives and the Faulknerian complexity put off casual readers — and partly by timing: by 1964, Kesey had abandoned conventional literary ambition for the Merry Pranksters and LSD. He never wrote another novel.