Ken Kesey
Ken Kesey was a leading figure of the counterculture movement and one of the world's most celebrated, critically acclaimed, and controversial authors. Kesey popularized LSD and other hallucinogens and wrote two of the era's most popular books. His debut novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, was a critical and commercial sensation that was followed soon after by his most substantial and ambitious book, Sometimes a Great Notion. In 1964, he and his friends, the "Merry Pranksters," made what would become a legendary cross-country bus trip. He was the subject of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe's account of West Coast hippies.
Ken Kesey Professional Experience / Academic History
Professional Experience
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Author
Academic History
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Bachelor's Degree, Speech and Communications
MORE ABOUT KEN KESEY
Kesey was dubbed a renegade prophet, a subversive technophile, and a spiritual junkie.
He is known for his role as the charismatic and proto-hippie leader of the West Coast LSD movement that sparked "The Sixties," as iconically recounted in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
He participated in U.S. Army experiments involving LSD and mescaline. These hallucinogenic experiences changed his outlook in life and inspired his writings.
The struggle between conformity and freedom took up an important part in his personal life, and he turned to psychedelic drugs to find personal liberation.