Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey (1935–2001) was an American novelist, essayist, and counterculture figure whose 1962 debut One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest became a bestseller, a Broadway play, and a five-Oscar film. He is also remembered as the leader of the Merry Pranksters, whose 1964 cross-country bus trip on the school bus Furthur was chronicled in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Kenneth Elton Kesey was born on 17 September 1935 in La Junta, Colorado. His father Frederick Kesey founded a dairy cooperative, and his mother Geneva Smith raised the family on a farm. In 1946 the Keseys moved to Springfield, Oregon, where Ken became a champion high-school wrestler and a state freestyle title-holder.

He studied speech and communication at the University of Oregon, graduating in 1957, and won a Woodrow Wilson scholarship to Stanford's creative writing program under Wallace Stegner. To pay tuition he volunteered for a CIA-funded MKUltra study at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration hospital, taking LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin and working as a psychiatric aide on the same ward.

His second novel Sometimes a Great Notion appeared in 1964. He later published Demon Box, the children's book Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear, and the novel Sailor Song. After a 1966 marijuana arrest and a brief flight to Mexico, he served five months in a county work camp and returned to a farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, where he died of liver complications on 10 November 2001.

His name Ken derives from a short form of Kenneth, from the Scottish Gaelic Coinneach meaning "handsome" or "comely." Ken is a masculine name used as a given name in its own right in English-speaking countries since the early twentieth century.