Ken Kesey
Ken Kesey was a writer best known for penning One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest (which was adapted into the award-winning film of the same name), as well as the less famous but equally lauded Pacific Northwestern epic, Sometimes a Great Notion (which was itself adapted into a film starring and directed by Paul Newman).
If that's all you know about Ken Kesey, though... Hoo boy, you're in for a long, strange trip.
To some, Ken Kesey's crowning achievement is not the composition of two classic 20th century novels, but instead his leadership of the Merry Pranksters and his role in the spread of late-1960s psychedelia[1]. Ideal places to find information on the adventures of Kesey and the Pranksters are The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe, and to a lesser extent Hell's Angels by Hunter S. Thompson and the poem "First Party at Ken Kesey's with Hell's Angels" by Allen Ginsberg.
He was recently caricatured in Across the Universe as "Doctor Robert."
Tropes associated with him include:
- Alliterative Name
- Everybody Must Get Stoned
- New Age Retro Hippie
- The Other Rainforest: Sometimes a Great Notion is a "burly," "brawling" novel about a family of loggers in Kesey's home state of Oregon. Regarded as the "Moby Dick of the Pacific Northwest," it is Something Completely Different from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
- ↑ Both the culture and the drugs.