One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [0]
“You feel this book along your spine.”
—The Kansas City Star
Ken Kesey (1935–2001) was born in La Junta, Colorado, and raised in Springfield, Oregon. He graduated from the University of Oregon and later studied at Stanford with Wallace Stegner, Malcolm Cowley, Richard Snow-croft, and Frank O’Connor. In 1959, at work on a novel but in need of cash, he became a subject in government-sponsored studies of LSD, mescaline, and other drugs being conducted at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Menlo Park, New Jersey. He later worked as a night attendant in the hospital’s psychiatric ward, an experience that led to the writing of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), his acclaimed first novel.
His second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, followed in 1964. By this time, Kesey was the leader of a group of friends called the Merry Pranksters, who embraced LSD and gave it to people at both private parties and public events (sometimes without their knowledge) to observe their reactions. He set out across the country in a psychedelically painted bus with the Beat hero Neal Cassady at the wheel, events later chronicled by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Kesey himself described, in words and pictures, his experiences in the counterculture movement in Kesey’s Garage Sale (1973). Other books by him include the novels Demon Box (1987), Sailor Song (1992), and Last Go Round (1994). He died in Oregon.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Ken Kesey
SIGNET
Published by New American Library, a division of
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Published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Viking edition.
ISBN 978-1-1012-0904-2
Copyright © Ken Kesey, 1962
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To Vik Lovell
who told me dragons did not exist,
then led me to their lairs
…one flew east, one flew west,
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest.
—Children’s folk rhyme
Contents
Part 1
Part 2
Part