Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey was an American author whose One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest — narrated by a Native American patient in a psychiatric institution — is one of the defining American novels of the 1960s and a foundational text of the counterculture.

Ken Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) partly based on his experiences working night shifts at a veterans’ hospital, where he also participated in government experiments with psychedelic drugs including LSD, mescaline, and peyote. The novel is narrated by Chief Bromden, a Native American patient in a psychiatric ward who has been pretending to be deaf and mute for years, and whose unreliable perception — he imagines the ward as a machine grinding down patients’ individuality — is the vehicle through which the novel’s critique of institutional power is delivered.

McMurphy, the novel’s ostensible hero — an Irish-American gambler who has arranged to serve his prison sentence in the psychiatric ward — represents vital, disruptive individual energy confronting the institutional order personified by Nurse Ratched. The battle between them is the novel’s drama; its resolution, which does not favor McMurphy, has been read as tragedy and as a more complex argument about the costs of heroic individualism. The novel was adapted as a highly successful film in 1975, with Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher winning Academy Awards for their performances.

Kesey’s subsequent novel, Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), was the book he himself considered his masterpiece — a longer, formally more ambitious novel about an Oregon logging family that sacrifices individual lives to collective pride. It has never achieved the cultural status of Cuckoo’s Nest. Kesey became a countercultural figure through the Merry Pranksters and the Acid Tests documented in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. He died in 2001.