Kesey, Ken (Elton) 1935-2001

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KESEY, Ken (Elton) 1935-2001

(O. U. Levon, a joint pseudonym)

PERSONAL: Born September 17, 1935, in La Junta, CO; died from complications following surgery for liver cancer, November 10, 2001, in Eugene, OR; son of Fred A. and Geneva (Smith) Kesey; married (Norma) Faye Haxby, May 20, 1956; children: Shannon A., Zane C., Jed M. (deceased), Sunshine M. Education: University of Oregon, B.A., 1957; Stanford University, graduate study, 1958-61, 1963.

CAREER: Novelist, artist, and farmer. Night attendant in psychiatric ward, Veterans Administration Hospital, Menlo Park, CA, 1961; Intrepid Trips, Inc. (motion picture company), president, 1964; Spit in the Ocean (magazine), editor, beginning 1974; University of Oregon, instructor in novel-writing, beginning 1990.

AWARDS, HONORS: Woodrow Wilson fellowship; Saxton Fund fellowship, 1959; Distinguished Service award, State of Oregon, 1978; Robert Kirsh Award, Los Angeles Times, 1991, for lifetime of work.

WRITINGS:

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (novel), Viking (New York, NY), 1962, 40th anniversary edition, illustrated and with new introduction by Kesey, 2002.

Sometimes a Great Notion (novel), Viking (New York, NY), 1964.

(Contributor) The Last Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools, Portola Institute, 1971.

(Editor, with Paul Krassner, and contributor) The Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog, Portola Institute, 1971.

(Compiler and contributor) Kesey's Garage Sale (interviews and articles, including "An Impolite Interview with Ken Kesey," and screenplay "O'Tools from My Chest"), introduction by Arthur Miller, Viking (New York, NY), 1973.

(Author of introduction) Paul Krassner, editor, Best of "The Realist": The Sixties' Most Outrageously Irreverent Magazine, Running Press, 1984.

Demon Box (essays, poetry, and stories, including "The Day after Superman Died," "Good Friday," "Finding Doctor Fung," "Run into the Great Wall," and "The Search for the Secret Pyramid"), Viking (New York, NY), 1986.

Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear (juvenile), illustrations by Barry Moser, Penguin (New York, NY), 1988.

(Under joint pseudonym O. U. Levon [anagram for "University of Oregon novel"] with others, and author of introduction) Caverns (mystery novel), Penguin (New York,NY), 1989.

The Further Inquiry (autobiographical screenplay), photographs by Ron Bevirt, Viking (New York, NY), 1990.

The Sea Lion (juvenile), Viking (New York, NY), 1991.

Sailor Song, Viking (New York, NY), 1992.

Last Go Round, Viking (New York, NY), 1994.

Kesey's Jail Journal: Cut the M***** Loose, Viking (New York, NY), 2003.

Also author of unpublished novels, "End of Autumn" and "Zoo," and of "Seven Prayers by Grandma Whittier," an unfinished novel serialized 1974-81 in Spit in the Ocean. Work included in anthologies, including Stanford Short Stories 1962, edited by Wallace Stegner and Richard Scowcroft, Stanford University Press, 1962. Contributor of articles to periodicals, including Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Oui.

A collection of Kesey's manuscripts is housed at the University of Oregon.

ADAPTATIONS: One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest was adapted for the stage by Dale Wasserman and produced on Broadway, 1963, revived in 1971 and 2001, and published as One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest: A Play in Three Acts, S. French (New York, NY), 1970, new edition with criticism, edited by John C. Pratt, 1973, revised edition, 1974; adapted for film by United Artists, 1975; and adapted for audiobook, 1998. Sometimes a Great Notion was adapted for film by Universal, 1972.

SIDELIGHTS: Ken Kesey, a writer and cultural hero of the mid-twentieth-century's so-called psychic frontier, is best known for his widely read novel One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and the insightful contemporary novel Sometimes a Great Notion. Kesey's works are set in California and Oregon, two locations representing two facets of Kesey's experience that provided the major tensions in his works. Oregon represents traditional rural family values and self-reliance inherited from Baptist pioneer stock; California is associated with the countercultural revolution in which Kesey played an important role during his lifetime. Therefore Kesey's name is often associated with the American West Coast and the hippie movement that centered itself there during the 1960s. Though he eventually adopted a more critical stance in regard to the alternative lifestyle he once championed, Kesey's later works remain haunted by fond references to the uninhibited life he enjoyed as a member of the Merry Pranksters, a group that traveled America in a bus when experimental drug use was at its peak. His novels, plays, screenplays, and essays express the author's intrepid quest for heightened consciousness in which he explored magic, hypnotism, mind-altering or psychoactive drugs, the occult, Eastern religions, and esoteric philosophies. His works also carry forward the American literary traditions of the Transcendentalists and the Beats as well as the frontier humor and vernacular style established by nineteenth-century humorist and novelist Mark Twain.

Kesey was born and raised "a hard-shell Baptist" in Colorado and Oregon, he once told Linda Gaboriau in a Crawdaddy interview. He accompanied his father on many hunting and fishing trips in the Pacific Northwest and developed a deep respect for nature. His love of the outdoors was matched by his fascination with extraordinary experience. He studied theatrical magic and learned to perform illusions. "I . . . did shows all through high school and in college," he once told Gaboriau. "I went from this into ventriloquism (and even had a show on TV), and from ventriloquism into hypnotism. And from hypnotism into dope. But it's always been the same trip, the same kind of search."

After high school Kesey auditioned for film roles in Hollywood before entering the University of Oregon in Eugene, where he majored in speech and communications and gained experience in acting and writing for radio and television. An active athlete during both high school and college, he won a scholarship as an outstanding college wrestler. Each of Kesey's interests figure largely in his works. Hunting and fishing are strategically important events in the two major works that established his literary reputation. His characters are physically strong and ready to compete against overwhelming pressure to conform to standards or submit to authorities that oppose their well-being. His style incorporates techniques borrowed from theatre and film such as flashbacks, fade-outs, and jump cuts, and he evidences a familiarity with the conventions of horror films and popular Westerns.

Kesey married his high school sweetheart, Faye Haxby, while at the University of Oregon, and moved to California where he enrolled in Stanford University's creative writing program. There he met Wallace Stegner, Richard Scowcroft, Malcolm Cowley, and Frank O'Connor—writers who were also literary critics—as well as fellow students Wendell Berry, Larry McMurtry, and Robert Stone. He also encountered the cultural radicalism then developing in Perry Lane, a section of Stanford patterned after the haven of the Beat movement in San Francisco's North Beach. According to Free You contributor Vie Lovell, to whom Kesey dedicated One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, the Perry Lane group "pioneered what have since become the hallmarks of hippie culture: LSD and other psychedelics too numerous to mention, body painting, light shows and mixed media presentations, total aestheticism, be-ins, exotic costumes, strobe lights, sexual mayhem, freakouts and the deification of psychoticism, eastern mysticism, and the rebirth of hair."

When Lovell suggested Kesey take part in the drug experiments being conducted at the Veterans Administration Hospital at Menlo Park, he accepted. There he was paid to ingest various psychoactive drugs and report on their effects. This experience, together with his experiences as an aide at the V.A. Hospital, led Kesey to write One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest is a celebration of the resilience of the human spirit as seen in the characteristically American resistance to corrupt authority. The novel tells how Randle Patrick McMurphy, a cocky, fast-talking inmate of a prison farm who has had himself committed to a mental hospital to avoid work, creates upheaval in the ward that is so efficiently and repressively directed by Nurse Ratched. His self-confidence and irrepressible sense of humor inspire the passive, dehumanized patients to rebel against Ratched and the "Combine" of society she represents. McMurphy ultimately sacrifices himself in the process of teaching his fellow patients the saving lessons of laughter and self-reliance.

Contemporary audiences reacted positively to Kesey's novel. In the early 1960s One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest presented a critique of an American society that had been portrayed in the 1950s as a lonely crowd of organization men who could achieve affluence only through strict conformity. That critique continued to suit the mood of the 1970s and 1980s because larger themes were also involved: the modern technological world as necessarily divorced from nature; contemporary society as repressive; authority as mechanical and destructive; and contemporary man as weak, frightened, and sexless, a victim of rational but loveless forces beyond his control. The novel's message—that people need to get back in touch with their world, to open doors of perception, to enjoy spontaneous sensuous experience, and to resist the manipulative forces of a technological society—was particularly appealing to the young. By the 1970s it was the contemporary novel most frequently used in college courses.

American audiences have appreciated the work in its incarnations as play, novel, and film. The stage version by Dale Wasserman appeared on Broadway with Kirk Douglas starring as McMurphy in 1963 and was revived in 1971, and again in 2001 when it was produced by Chicago's Steppenwolf theater company and starred actor Gary Sinise. The film version, directed by Milos Forman and starring Jack Nicholson, was a box office hit and won six Academy Awards in 1975.

Kesey's novel has been analyzed by critics beyond the literary realm due to the breadth of subjects, issues, and disciplines it includes. In Lex et Scientia, the official journal of the International Academy of Law and Science, Ralph Porzio described One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest as "a cornucopia of source material from disciplines so numerous and varied as to challenge the mind and imagination." Porzio observed that it touches upon psychology, psychiatry, medicine, literature, human relations, drama, art, cosmology, law, religion, American culture, and folk culture through a kaleidoscopic blend of tragedy, pathos, and humor. A partial list of topics that show up in various analyses the book include: patterns of romance, patterns of comedy, patterns of tragedy, black humor, the absurd, the hero in modern dress, the comic Christ, folk and western heroes, the fool as mentor, the Grail Knight, attitudes toward sex, abdication of masculinity, the politics of laughter, mechanistic and totemistic symbols, the comic strip, the ritualistic father-figure, and the psychopathic savior.

Ronald Wallace, writing in The Last Laugh: Form and Affirmation in the Contemporary American Comic Novel, connected the novel directly to Kesey's early interest in comic books by pointing out that its main characters are drawn from ancient conventions of comedy. Wallace perceived in Nurse Ratched and McMurphy respectively the aiazon—the boastful, deluded fool—and the eiron—the witty self-deprecator who defeats his opponent by hiding his skill and intelligence. Furthermore, Wallace saw McMurphy as a "Dionysian Lord of Misrule" who "presides over a comic fertility ritual and restores instinctual life to the patients." In a Critique review, Terry G. Sherwood noticed the balance between comic strip conventions and those belonging to the serious novel, since the work's major confrontation is between good and evil. Journal of Narrative Technique reviewer Michael Boardman pointed out the novel's power as a classic tragedy because it portrays a character opposed by forces from within himself as well as from others. The conflict between Ratched and McMurphy becomes a struggle between McMurphy's need for freedom as an individual and his need to survive in a hostile environment by conforming to oppressive standards. The conventions of the Western novel with its characters, colloquialisms, and frontier values are also present in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, observed Richard Blessing in the Journal of Popular Culture. Blessing wrote, "Essentially, the McMurphy who enters the ward is a frontier hero, an anachronistic paragon of rugged individualism, relentless energy, capitalistic shrewdness, virile coarseness and productive strength. He is Huck Finn with muscles, Natty Bumppo with pubic hair. He is the descendant of the pioneer who continually fled civilization and its feminizing and gentling influence."

While many reviewers saw much to learn from the book, the brand of individualism and freedom presented in McMurphy's behavior approaches anarchy too closely for others. The mayhem he raises by throwing plates and butter at walls, shouting obscenities, breaking windows, sneaking prostitutes into the ward, and stealing boats, claimed Bruce E. Wallis in Cithara, is not a foundation for lasting sanity and self-esteem beyond reproach. The best opposition to society's more repressive forces, Wallis maintained, may not, after all, be man's sexual and nonrational capacities.

Some critics were alarmed by the novel's portrayal of women. Leslie Horst noted in Lex et Scientia that Kesey's depiction of Nurse Ratched is demeaning; in fact, "considerable hatred of women is justified in the logic of the novel. The plot demands that the dreadful women who break the rules men have made for them become the targets of the reader's wrath." Viewing the novel primarily from the aspect of gender, Robert Forrey in Modern Fiction Studies claimed that "the premise of the novel is that women ensnare, emasculate, and, in some cases, crucify men." On the other hand, Wallace contended that there is no misogyny intended in Kesey's reversal of traditionally assigned gender-appropriate roles, which Wallace related to all comic literature "from Aristophanes to Erica Jong." Boardman suggested that Ratched is not meant to represent womankind, but to be the incarnation of evil required by the novel's dramatic action. In The Art of Grit: Ken Kesey's Fiction, M. Gilbert Porter reported Kesey's comment that any good story needs a villain that is truly recognizably evil if the writer is to fulfill his ethical purpose, that of standing "between the public and evil. . . . The good writer in [Kesey's] opinion is a person of 'power' and character who guards faithfully that axis of human choice."

In his book Ken Kesey, Barry Leeds commented that Kesey's second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, is superior to One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest because it is "a far more artistically impressive work on several levels. In terms of structure, point of view, theme, it is more ambitious, more experimental, and ultimately more successful." Sometimes a Great Notion reflects Kesey's Oregon background and the concerns of the upper Northwest region. The title refers to the folksong refrain "Sometimes it seems a great notion / to jump in the river and drown," and signals one of the book's themes: the relatively high suicide rate in the Wakonda logging town and others like it. In the novel independent loggers Hank and Leland Stamper are at odds with their union-dominated community and with each other. After Hank involves his Ivy-leagueeducated half-brother's mother in a sexual relationship, Leland seeks revenge by seducing Hank's wife. The novel approaches these events from a variety of points of view to reveal what the brothers learn from each other.

Like William Faulkner, Kesey comments on the subjectivity of perception by using the cinematic device of multiple perspectives. To make the medium of fiction more fit for his purpose, he liberates himself from the chronological order used in most conventional novels. He also employs conscious authorial intrusion. Innovative use of italics, capital letters, and parentheses help him replicate in print the confusion, moral bankruptcy, and future shock his characters face.

In many ways, the conflict between the Stamper brothers corresponds to Kesey's own inner conflicts. During his college years, the conflict between his down-home athletic nature and his more artistic and intellectual side became more obvious. He could socialize with both intellectuals and more active groups, but they did not usually find each other mutually acceptable. The brothers in Sometimes a Great Notion embody these conflicting impulses. As he once explained to Gordon Lish in a Genesis West interview: "I want to find out which side of me really is: the woodsy, logger side—complete with homespun homilies and crackerbarrel corniness, a valid side of me that I like—or its opposition. The two Stamper brothers in the novel are each one of the ways I think I am."

In 1963, as Kesey was finishing Sometimes a Great Notion, a developer forced the evacuation of Perry Lane, and the Keseys moved to La Honda where he continued as a leader of the psychedelic movement. For the next few years he set aside his writing and sought an alternative with Neal Cassady and other kindred spirits in a group called the Merry Pranksters. His curiosity about altered states of consciousness stimulated by the experiments at the V.A. Hospital, Kesey continued his experimental drug use with the group at La Honda. Evolving from private parties to public parties to large-scale public events, the groups' "acid-tests" introduced light shows, psychedelic art, mixed-media presentations, and acid rock music to the growing hippie culture.

Headed for the New York World's Fair and the events surrounding the publication of Sometimes a Great Notion, the Pranksters crossed the country in a 1939 International Harvester bus decorated with bright colors applied at random. Kesey's accounts of those days appear in Kesey's Garage Sale, Demon Box, and The Further Inquiry.

Critics have referred to Kesey's Garage Sale as the book in which the destructive potential of drugs caught up with the author. It contains his screenplay "Over the Border," based on his 1967 flight to Mexico to avoid prosecution for marijuana possession. After witnessing the squalor and anti-American sentiments of small Mexican towns, and after his son survived a close brush with death, Kesey returned to California to serve a short sentence at the San Mateo County Jail and the San Mateo Sheriff's Honor Camp. Afterward, he moved to a farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, near Eugene. Many fans sought him out at the farm, looking for drug experiences or a place to live, and numbered in the hundreds each week during the 1970s. Demon Box, Kesey's 1986 collection of shorter works written in the '70s and '80s, reflects on both his pleasant and unpleasant experiences in the counterculture.

The Further Inquiry, Kesey's 1990 retrospective on the Merry Prankster years, examines the 1960s and 1970s from a more mature perspective. Structured as a mock trial, the screenplay pits a prosecutor named Chest against the testimony of the various Pranksters. Dierdre English observed in the New York Times Book Review that, for the author, "the Pranksters were not pioneers but 'unsettlers,' and their destination was no destination. And one not need blame LSD and marijuana for the sins of heroin and cocaine to admit that the acid revolution did leave some dead Indians behind." In this trial, Kesey "is at once confessing to the damage done and asking for equal consideration of the righteous fun the Pranksters wreaked," English explained. "Uptight America was in desperate need of what they provided: an astoundingly successful communal exorcism of the stifling spirits of the 50s' conformity. In the current cultural atmosphere, a new puritanism about sex, drugs and rebellious play, it would be liberating to quaff a hit of what the Pranksters had—their all-out excitement, spontaneity and spoofing. But some of their ideas of fun no longer amuse." English concluded that the group is only partly acquitted by this defense, especially when compared to other accounts of their activities such as Paul Perry's On the Bus: The Complete Guide to the Legendary Trip of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and the Birth of the Counterculture.

Taking experimental literary risks in the 1980s, Kesey wrote the children's book Little Trickler the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear. In this story, as in his other books, good conquers evil in the form of a little squirrel who decides to stop the bullying of a local tyrant. He also worked with thirteen creative-writing graduate students to write Caverns, a mystery novel, leaving it to the students to see that it was published. The novel begins in 1934 when an itinerant evangelist named Loach discovers a cave decorated with archetypical "drawings that will challenge conventional ideas about American archaeology and Western religion," Alfred Bendixen related in the New York Times Book Review. The story follows Loach from his discovery of the cave, to the murder of a photographer and a subsequent prison term, and finally to his quest to rediscover the cave, accompanied by an archaeologist, a reporter, a priest, two mediums, and a large cast of motley characters. Bendixen added, "The book is probably best described as a partly successful attempt to fuse the adventures of Indiana Jones with the cosmic spirit and multiple perspectives of 'The Canterbury Tales.'" However, Madison Smartt Bell commented in the Voice Literary Supplement "The result less resembles The Canterbury Tales than an uneven day at the Mingus Jazz Workshop. It's fun to isolate the solos; Kesey's seem the strongest, probably because they are the most recognizable. . . . Most scenes and characters are slightly overdrawn, giving the book a cartoon quality which is nonetheless appealing—it has the same amiably sarcastic relation to the junk adventure novels of the '30s and '40s that the Indiana Jones movies have to old serials. At the same time there are some moving and revealing moments." Bendixen observed that the novel is weakened by the lack of a unified authorial voice, its large cast of mostly unsympathetic characters, and its emphasis on plot and comic misadventures, yet it succeeds in being "a revolutionary model for the teaching of creative writing" by "reminding us . . . that the novel requires an individual voice, fully realized characters and a clear sense of time and place."

Working on the Caverns group project helped break the writer's block Kesey encountered half-way through his novel Sailor Song, a result of the tragic death of his son Jed in 1984. He finished the novel nine years later, making it his first adult novel in two decades. Sailor Song features trademark Kesey zaniness, especially in the details surrounding the plot. It takes place a few years in the future, where most of the ecological disasters that were predicted to happen during the 1980s actually do. There is global warming, nuclear pollution in the oceans, high rates of cancer, and drug addiction. The story is set in the run-down Alaskan fishing village of Kuinak, where residents as diverse as refugees, travelers, and DEAPS—Descendants of Early Aboriginal Peoples—try to make a comfortable home in an increasingly uncomfortable world. Ike Sallas, the hero of the novel, is a former crop duster who, when his daughter died of an ecologically based illness, took revenge on the world by dumping fertilizers on state fairs and other places where people congregated. After being caught he became a middleclass hero. Years later, living in Kuinak, he still inspires admiration among the natives. Enter Nicholas Levertov, an albino Hollywood movie producer, who stalks into this relatively untouched paradise scouting for a location to shoot his next movie. However, as Levertov soon makes clear, he intends to change Kuinak forever by turning it into a tourist attraction. The citizenry of the village go berserk, with some residents wanting the money to be gained by complying with Levertov's desires and others wanting the village to remain untouched.

Critical reception to Kesey's novel was mixed. "Sailor Song does not make one single particle of sense," complained New York Times Book Review critic Donald E. Westlake, who dubbed the book "a long-awaited return, maybe too long," for Kesey. Westlake criticized the structure of the book and concluded that "the novel, having been incoherent from the beginning, turns apocalyptic at the end, which doesn't in any way help." Roger Rosenblatt, writing in the New Republic, also had complaints about Sailor Song. "Kesey could have been a pretty good writer-writer, but chose instead to be a culture-writer. . . . Style to the culture-writer is not writing, but a kind of animated macho typing." Rosenblatt averred that "the new novel is plotless and idealess and pointless in its overflow of parables, anecdotes and caricatures. . . . His writing screams its own insecurity." Yet critic Joe Chidley in Maclean's had a different view of Sailor Song, praising Kesey's eccentric world and noting that the author's "patient development of a world about to self-destruct is fascinating. And he successfully weaves a moving and mature love story into the complicated tale." Chidley argued that with Sailor Song Kesey "proves that despite the long hiatus, he is still in full control of the narrative form" and shows himself to be a "prodigious talent that has been absent for far too long."

In a departure from much of his work, Kesey explores the world of the dime-novel western with his 1994 book Last Go Round, written with friend Ken Babbs and based on a story Kesey's father told about the 1911 Pendleton Round Up, where an African-American bronco rider, an older Native American, and a young boy from Tennessee battled to win the title of World Champion All Round Cowboy of the West. Kesey used this story as inspiration, creating his novel out of an amalgam of facts and his own imagination. Jackson Sundown, the Native American, manages to retain his dignity whether he is drinking or not. Johnathan E. Lee Spain is the naive young Tennessean and the story's narrator, and George Fletcher is the black bronco rider. Kesey throws these characters together into a variety of adventures, all for one less-than-lofty goal: to win the silver saddle, and also manages to inject a 1990s race sensitivity into a novel of an earlier time.

Janet Burroway, writing in the New York Times Book Review, claimed that with Last Go Round the authors "produced a pulp-thin plot . . . together with an excess of episode, inflated atmosphere and wonders of prowess, just what's demanded in the formula for the original dime westerns." She believed that the novel shows great promise but hoped Kesey's future efforts would be more focused: "we cheer him back on the bronc, hoping this is not the absolute Last Go Round. But neither does this novel win the silver saddle." Dick Roraback summed up the novel in the Los Angeles Times Book Review by calling it "Entertaining. Wacky. Sometimes Sappy." Unfortunately for Burroway, Last Go Round was true to its title: it was Kesey's last work of fiction.

Though Kesey's works are few in number, they are considered significant additions to that body of writing that seeks to explore and extend the limits of the human spirit. His fiction displays a distinctive blending of a unique American tradition: As an extension of the Beat movement it reflects the concerns and attitudes of American Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Kesey's approach to cherished American traditions and values is original and engaging, and his humor grows naturally out of the situations and idioms of his characters. He displays a skill for creating the revealing anecdote and readily perceives both the rational and more complex sides of human nature, giving his characters the spiritual depth necessary to fully represent themes of freedom and the moral responsibilities of creativity. His innovative fictional technique and self-criticism are notable. Furthermore, in keeping with Kesey's oft-cited declaration that he would "rather live a novel than write one," his personal quests made him an influential leader in culture as well as literature.

Kesey died of complications from surgery for liver cancer on November 10, 2001, shortly before the republication of his classic One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. For this fortieth anniversary edition, Kesey added a new introduction and twenty-five drawings he made during the period when he worked in a mental institution.

Following Kesey's death, various writers paid homage to him, citing ways in which Kesey had influenced both them and culture as a whole. A People writer said that Kesey's mantra that "It is possible to be different without being a threat" was one he followed throughout his life. In Entertainment Weekly Chris Nashawaty spoke of how he once sat next to Kesey during a meal at the Sundance Film Festival, and Kesey spoke of his long and interesting life to the young journalist. When Nashawaty entertained Kesey with a description of the beauty of the starry constellations that could be seen in the Sahara Desert, Kesey wished to write down the exact location of the place so that he might include it in "his list of wonders yet to discover."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Acton, Jay, Alan Le Mond, and Parker Hodges, Mug Shots: Who's Who in the New Earth, World Publishing, 1972.

Allen, Mary, The Necessary Blankness: Women in Major American Fiction of the Sixties, University of Illinois Press, 1976.

Billingsley, Ronald G., The Artistry of Ken Kesey, University of Oregon, 1971.

Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, 1968-1988, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1989.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 1, 1973, Volume 3, 1975, Volume 6, 1976, Volume 11, 1979, Volume 46, 1987, Volume 64, 1991.

Cook, Bruce, The Beat Generation, Scribner (New York, NY), 1971.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 2: American Novelists since World War II, 1978, Volume 16: The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America, 1983.

Harris, Charles B., Contemporary American Novelists of the Absurd, College & University Press, 1971.

Kesey, Ken, Kesey's Garage Sale, Viking (New York, NY), 1973.

Kesey, Ken, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Viking (New York, NY), 1962, 40th anniversary edition, 2002.

Kesey, Ken, Sometimes a Great Notion. Viking (New York, NY), 1964.

Kesey, Ken, The Further Inquiry, Viking (New York, NY), 1990.

Krassner, Paul, How a Satirical Editor Became a Yippie Conspirator in Ten Easy Years, Putnam (New York, NY), 1971.

Labin, Suzanne, Hippies, Drugs, and Promiscuity, Arlington House, 1972.

Leeds, Barry H., Ken Kesey, F. Ungar (New York, NY), 1981.

Perry, Paul, On the Bus: The Complete Guide to the Legendary Trip of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and the Birth of the Counterculture, Thunder's Mouth Press, 1990.

Porter, M. Gilbert, The Art of Grit: Ken Kesey's Fiction, University of Missouri Press, 1982.

Wallace, Ronald, The Last Laugh: Form and Affirmation in the Contemporary American Comic Novel, University of Missouri Press, 1971.

Wolfe, Tom, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1968.

PERIODICALS

Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Volume 376, 1968.

CEA Critic, Volume 37, 1975.

Children's Book Review Service, winter, 1992, p. 71.

Cithara, Volume 12, 1972.

Crawdaddy, Volume 29, 1972.

Critique, Volume 5, 1962; Volume 13, 1971.

Free You, Volume 2, 1968.

Genesis West, fall, 1963.

Harper's, August, 1994, p. 22.

Inc., August, 2001, review of Sometimes a Great Notion, p. 91.

Journal of American Studies, Volume 5, 1971.

Journal of Narrative Technique, Volume 9, 1979.

Journal of Popular Culture, winter, 1971.

Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 1994, p. 651.

Kliatt, September, 1998, review of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (audiobook), p. 62.

Lex et Scientia, Volume 13, issues 1-2, 1977.

Library Journal, April 15, 1998, review of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (audiobook), p. 134; February 1, 2002, Michael Rogers, p. 138.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 31, 1986; September 18, 1994, p. 6.

Maclean's, September 7, 1992, p. 50.

Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 19, 1973; Volume 21, 1975.

Nation, February 23, 1974.

New Republic, October 26, 1992.

New Statesman, October 10, 1986.

New Yorker, April 21, 1962; December 1, 1975.

New York Herald Tribune, February 25, 1962; July 27, 1964; August 2, 1964.

New York Review of Books, September 10, 1964.

New York Times, July 27, 1964; January 18, 1966; March 12, 1966; October 21, 1966; August 4, 1986; July 7, 1994, p. C18.

New York Times Book Review, February 4, 1962; August 2, 1964; August 18, 1968; October 7, 1973; August 4, 1986; September 14, 1986; December 31, 1989; January 21, 1990; December 9, 1990; August 23, 1992, p. 5; July 10, 1994, p. 11.

Northwest Review, spring, 1963; spring, 1977.

Observer, July 25, 1993, p. 25.

People, March 22, 1976.

Publishers Weekly, April 25, 1994, p. 53; August 1, 1994, p. 28.

Rocky Mountain Review, Volume 43, number 1, 1989.

Rolling Stone, March 7, 1970; September 27, 1973; July 18, 1974; October 5, 1989.

School Library Journal, November, 1991, p. 101.

Time, February 16, 1962; July 24, 1964; February 12, 1965; September 8, 1986.

Times Literary Supplement, February 24, 1966; February 25, 1972.

Voice Literary Supplement, February 2, 1990.

Washington Post, June 9, 1974.

Washington Post Book World, August 10, 1986; July 9, 1995, p. 12.