Ken Kesey

A novelist and, as leader of the Merry Pranksters, has been a cult figure since the early 1960s.

He was born September 17, 1935 in La Junta, Colorado.

Based on his experience, in part, of the North Beach beatnik community.Kesey began a novel called Zoo about the intersection of middle America and bohemia. Like Jack Kerouac, Kesey was a jock/artist, and the two worlds frequently collided inside of both of them. Kesey played football in high school and in 1960 he competed in a wrestling tournament for a spot on the Olympic team.

He didn't get to the Olympics but during the summer of 1960 he did enroll in a test of psychotomimetic drugs at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital. For several weeks Kesey was dosed with drugs like psilocybin, LSD, IT-290 and Ditran.

These drug experiments altered Kesey's basic reality paradigm and he began his own sustained period of psychedelic research. During that summer he worked as a psychiatric aide at the Veterans Hospital and began writing One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, which would become his first published novel.

Shortly after Cuckoo's Nest was published in 1962, Neal Cassady appeared at Kesey's Perry Lane home. Cassady had read the novel, and was strongly identifying with the Randle P.

McMurphy character. For the next couple of years, Cassady would provide his cosmic services to Kesey and his band of psychedelic warriors, The Merry Pranksters.

In the summer of 1964 Kesey met Jack Kerouac at a Prankster party in New York. The meeting, apparently, did not go well. Urged to go to the party by his old road warrior pal, Cassady, Kerouac stayed just a few minutes at the party and apparently left disgusted.

Kesey felt bad about his botched meeting with Kerouac. An opportunity had been missed largely through an inexcusable lack of sensitivity. To the Pranksters, Kerouac was like a symbolic big brother, who'd given them the confidence and direction when they'd most needed it, but had been unable to follow his own example. He had been King of the Beats, but he'd renounced the crown.

Kesey continued throughout the decade riding the crest of cultural change. As the Beat Generation vortex lost its central pressure and the next generation emerged, Kesey was there, spanning both cultural cyclones.

Kesey's Merry Pranksters, with Neal Cassady driving their magical mystery bus "Furthur", were the direct descendants of those hipsters who, fifteen years earlier, drove down the highway, in a two-toned Hudson, looking for America.