One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Introduction

Ken Kesey Elton (English. Ken Kesey Elton, September 17 1935 - November 10 2001) is an American writer and known, in particular, as the author of the novel "Over Cuckoo's Nest”. Kesey considered one of the major writers of the beat generation and the generation of hippies, who had a great influence on the formation of these movements and their culture.

Biography

Early years

Born in the small town of La Honda, State of Colorado, the son of the owner of oil mills. In 1946. he moved to Springfield, the State of Oregon. Youth Kesey was on his father's farm in the Willamette Valley, where he was raised in respectable, devout American family. In high school, and later in college Kesey interested in sports and even became a state champion in wrestling. After high school, Ken escapes from home with a classmate Heksbi Fay. Later, Fay will be the eternal companion of true ideologue of the counterculture, and bear him four children. In 1957, Kesey graduated from the Faculty of Journalism University of Oregon. Became interested in literature, was awarded the National Fellowship of Woodrow Wilson and enrolled in the studies Creative Writing at Stanford University. Details about the early years of life, Kesey tells Chuck Kaynder in the novel "Honeymoon" (2001).

Experiments with psychedelic drugs

In 1959 at Stanford University. to earn Kesey went to work as an assistant psychiatrist at the hospital veterans, which voluntarily participated in the experiments on the effects on the body of LSD, mescaline and other psychedelics (Porter, 74).

In 1964, together with like-minded friends, he organized Different things, the municipality arranged concerts, happenings, called " acid tests "(Eng. Acid Tests) with the distribution of LSD to anyone. "Acid Tests" were often accompanied by light effects (strobe) and the music that played live, a young band Grateful Dead.

Later, these parties are often visited the poet Allen Ginsberg, and have been here a baptism of fire "acid" and the legendary Hell's Angels, which is well lit Hunter S. Thompson in his book Hell's Angels. A Strange and Terrible Saga of Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs.

In 1959, Kesey wrote Zoo, a novel which is about the beatnik living in the municipality of North Beach (San Francisco), but it was never published. In 1960, he wrote the end of autumn, a young man who left his working family after receiving scholarship of Ivy League school, but then again it was not published (Safer, 104).

The idea of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Kesey went to work during the night nurse at the hospital of veterans in Menlo Park. Kesey often spent time talking with patients, sometimes under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs, which he took by participating in experiments with psychedelics. Kesey did not believe that these patients were abnormal, but rather society has rejected them because they did not fit the conventional wisdom about how people should behave. Published in 1962, the novel was an immediate success, and in 1963, it was redesigned in the success which had a statement ...