Kenneth Elton Kesey was an American novelist, essayist, and countercultural figure. He considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.
Those of us who grew up during the sixties will remember him as the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, still one of America’s most challenged and banned novels.
Did you know that the title actually comes from a nursery rhyme?
Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn,
Apple seed and apple thorn,
Wire, briar, limber lock
Three geese in a flock
One flew East
One flew West
And one flew over the cuckoo’s nest
at Grateful Dead exhibit in San Francisco, September 2026.
Kesey was born in La Junta Colorado in 1935 to dairy farmers and grew up in Springfield, Oregon. Graduating from theUniversity of Oregon in 1957. He began writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1960 after completing a graduate fellowship in creative writing at Stanford. The novel was an immediate commercial and critical success when published two years later.
In 1965, after being arrested for marijuana possession and faking suicide, Kesey was imprisoned for five months. Shortly thereafter, he returned home to the Willamette Valley and settled in Pleasant Hills, Oregon, Pleasant Hill, Oregon, where he maintained a secluded, family-oriented lifestyle for the rest of his life.
The inspiration for the book came while Kesey was working the night shift at a Veterans’ Hospital, sometimes under the influence of the hallucinogenic drugs he had volunteered to experiment with. He often spent time talking to the patients and did not believe these patients were insane but rather that society had pushed them out because they did not fit conventional ideas of how people were supposed to act and behave.
When the 1964 publication of his second novel Sometimes a Great Nation required his presence in New York, Kesey, and group of friends calling themselves Merry Pranksters took a cross-country trip in a school bus they had nicknamed ‘Further. The trip was the group’s attempt to create art out of everyday life and to experience roadway America while high on LSD
A year later, in 1965, after being arrested for marijuana possession and faking suicide, Kesey was imprisoned for five months.
Shortly thereafter, he returned home to Oregon, where he maintained a secluded, family-oriented lifestyle for the rest of his life.
In 1984, 20-year-old son Jed, a wrestler for the University of Oregon, suffered severe head injuries on the way to a match when the team’s loaned van crashed after sliding off an icy highway.
The phone rang in the nurses’ quarters. It was the doctor.
He had just appraised all the latest readouts on the monitors.
“Your son is essentially dead, Mr. Kesey. I’m very sorry.”
And the sorrow rung absolutely honest.
Kesey was diagnosed with diabetes in 1992 and by 1997, age only 58, health problems began to take a toll on Kesey, starting with a stroke. In 2001, Kesey had surgery on his liver to remove a tumor at Sacred Heart Medical Center, in Eugene. He did not recover and died of complications several weeks later at age 66. After a public service in Eugene, his body was brought back to his farm and buried next to Jed.
