Ken Kesey (born Ken Kesey, September 17, 1935 - November 10, 2001) is an American writer. Known, in particular, as the author of the novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Kesey is considered one of the main writers of generations of hipsters and hippies, who had a great influence on the formation of these movements and their culture. Born in La Honda, Colorado, in the family of the owner of the oil mill. In 1946 he moved to Springfield, Oregon. In 1957 he graduated from the Department of Journalism, University of Oregon. He began to get involved in literature, so he began to attend literary courses at Stanford University. In 1959, at Stanford University, to earn money, Kesey went to work as an assistant psychiatrist at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital, where he voluntarily participated in experiments to study the effects of LSD, mescaline and other hallucinogens on the body.
In 1964, together with like-minded friends, he organized a hippy commune called Merry Pranksters (English Merry Pranksters). The municipality organized happenings called “acid tests” (English acid tests) with the distribution of LSD to everyone. Acid Tests were often accompanied by light effects (strobe lights) and music played live by the young band The Warlocks, which later became widely known by changing their name to Grateful Dead. Having bought an old school bus, “Pranksters” painted it in bright psychedelic colors, called “Furthur” (a modification of the word further - further, the translation into Russian - “Further”, that is, “further” without a soft sign) and went on a trip to America , which the most prominent publicist and historian of the twentieth century, Jean Baudrillard called "the strangest journey in the history of mankind, after a campaign for the Golden Fleece of the Argonauts and the forty-year journey of Moses through the desert."
This period of the life and work of Ken Kesey and The Jolly Pranksters is captured in Tom Wolfe's documentary The Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test. The New York Times called this novel the best hippie book.
When LSD was outlawed in the United States, the Jolly Pranksters moved to Mexico. But upon returning to the United States, Kesey was arrested for possession of marijuana and sentenced to 5 months. After his release, he moved to Pleasant Hill, Oregon to devote himself to his family.
Psychoactive drug experience at the Veterans Hospital was used by Kesey in writing the first book, One Flew over the cuckoo's nest, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's. Milos Forman put the film of the same name in 1975. Kesey was very dissatisfied with the film adaptation. In particular, due to the fact that in the film the Leader of the Mop is “pushed into the background”, while in the novel it is one of the main characters on behalf of whom the narration is conducted.
Following the success of this novel, in 1962, Kesey bought land in La Honda, California. Here he wrote a new book, "Sometimes it is unbearably wanting ..." (eng. Sometimes a great notion), which tells about a family with diverse, complex characters, in which there is a conflict between the individualism of the US West Coast and the Eastern intellectualism. Later, in Pleasant Hill, Kesey wrote his third novel, Sailor Song, which was published only in 1992. Kesey also wrote many essays and short stories.