Ken Elton Kesey’s Biography

Ken Elton Kesey was born on September 17, 1935 in La Junta, Colorado. Growing up, Kesey was involved in wrestling and football. He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Oregon in 1957 and married his high school sweetheart, Norma Faye Haxby, in 1956. He had three kids and one daughter in 1966 with Carolyn Adams. Later he won a scholarship to Stanford University’s creative writing program to become an author. In 1960, He worked as an attendant in a hospital's psychiatric ward and volunteered at the Veterans' Administration Hospital as a paid experimental subject in a study conducted by the U.S. Army in which he was given mind-altering drugs and asked to report on their effects. Time passed and at the age of 40 and 50, he continued his passion and wrote. In 1984, Kesey’s son, Jed, passed away due to a car accident.

However, Kesey continued to perform and he often appeared on stage at Grateful Dead concerts. At the age of 66, Kesey passed away in Eugene, Oregon, on November 10, 2001, due to some complications after a liver cancer surgery. After many experiences with the drugs, Kesey started to believe the drugs had great potential. After writing some books, he believed that the key to “individual liberation” was psychedelic drugs, and he often wrote under the influence of it. When everyone was focused on the Space Race, Kesey saw psychoactives as “tools for exploring inward, learning more about ourselves and others, and finding new ways to see the world already around us”. During the experiments, Kesey even tried ingesting the drugs in order to get an insight of the other perceptions of the world.

Kesey became so “addicted” to this experiment, that he even convinced his friends to try electroshock therapy in order to have accuracy in his novel. The LSD experimentation and associated parties, also known as “Acid Tests”, grew in popularity. However, in 1965, Ken got caught for marijuana possession and after faking a suicide and his fled to Mexico, he returned to face the charges. This experiment also introduced Kesey to several individuals for the characters in his book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which examined the abuses of the system against the individual. The book projects Kesey’s interest in altered consciousness. He also used his experiences working at the hospital as the inspiration for his book, which became immediately successful upon its publication in 1962. In my honest opinion, I think that Kesey is absolutely crazy. I do not understand his perspective and I dislike that he wrote his books under the influence of drugs.

This shows that Kesey was not in the right state of mind and did not “truly” write the book. Yes, he is the author, but mentally, I do not think that Ken Elton Kesey wrote it. I believe that you should be in the “right” mind and mentality when you are writing a book. However, I have not read the book yet, so I guess that I am judging a book by its cover.