Kenneth Elton Kesey ( ; 17 September 1935 - November 10, 2001) is an American novelist, essayist, and cultural figure. He considers himself the liaison between the 1950s Beat Generation and the 1960s hippies.
Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado, and grew up in Springfield, Oregon, graduated from the University of Oregon in 1957. He began writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1960 after the completion of a fellowship graduate in creative writing at Stanford University; This novel was a direct commercial and critical success when it was published two years later. During this period, Kesey participated in a government study involving hallucinogenic drugs (including mescaline and LSD) to supplement his income.
After the publication of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, he moved to La Honda, California, and began holding events with former colleagues from Stanford, bohemians and literary figures (notably Neal Cassady), and friends others under the imprimatur of Pranksters Merry; these parties, known as the Acid Tests, integrate the consumption of LSD with multimedia performances. He guided the Actual Tests' Grateful Dead (the de facto ) throughout their thinking and continued to have a major influence on the group throughout their long career. Sometimes the Great Potion - an epic tale about the changes of an Oregon logging family that aspires to William Faulkner's modernist Majesty William Yoknapatawpha saga - is a commercial success that polarized the critics and readers when it was released in 1964, though Kesey regarded the novel as its magnum opus.
In 1965, after the arrest for possession of marijuana and fake suicide, Kesey was imprisoned for five months. Shortly thereafter, he returned to the Willamette Valley and settled in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, where he maintained an isolated, family-oriented lifestyle for the rest of his life. In addition to teaching at the University of Oregon - an experience that culminated in Caverns (1989), a collaborative novel written by Kesey and his graduate student workshop under the pseudonym "OU Levon" - he continues to contribute regularly to fiction and reporting for publications like Esquire , Rolling Stone , Oui , Walk and Whole Earth Catalog ; various iterations of these pieces were collected at Kesey's Garage Sale (1973) and Demon Box (1986).
Between 1974 and 1980, Kesey published six editions of Spit in the Ocean, a literary magazine featuring excerpts from an unfinished novel ( Seven Prayers by Grandma Whittier , Kesey's account of the struggle grandmother with Alzheimer's disease) and contributions from such figures as Margo St James, Kate Millett, Stewart Brand, Saul-Paul Sirag, Jack Sarfatti, Paul Krassner, and William S. Burroughs. After the third novel ( Sailor Song ) was released for a warm review in 1992, he reunited with Pranksters Merry and began publishing works on the Internet until illness (including strokes) limited his activity.
Video Ken Kesey
Biography
Initial life
Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado, to the dairy farmer of Geneva (nÃÆ' Â © e Smith) and Frederick A. Kesey. In 1946, the family moved to Springfield, Oregon. Kesey is a champion wrestler in high school and college in the 174-pound weight division, and he almost qualifies to be on the Olympic team until a serious shoulder injury stops his wrestling career. He graduated from Springfield High School in 1953. A loyal reader and film writer, young Kesey took John Wayne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Zane Gray as role models (later named a son Zane) and played with magic, ventriloquism, and hypnotism.
In 1956, while attending the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication in neighboring Eugene, Oregon, Kesey eloped with her boyfriend in high school, Norma "Faye" Haxby, whom she met in seventh grade. According to Kesey, "Without Faye, I will be swept away by fame and freaks, fuel-rich ideas and flowering girls with sparkling eyes and round breasts." Married until his death at the age of 66, they have three children: Jed, Zane, and Shannon. In addition, with Faye Kesey's consent, Ken's father is a daughter, Sunshine Kesey, with fellow Merry Prankster Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Adams. Born in 1966, Sunshine was raised by Adams and his stepfather, Jerry Garcia.
Kesey had a soccer scholarship for her first year, but turned to the University of Oregon wrestling team as a better build. After posting a.885 percentage of victory in the 1956-57 season, he accepted the Fred Low Scholarship for the superb Northwest wrestler. In 1957, Kesey was second in her weight class in the Pacific intercleational competition. He remains "ranked in the top 10 percentage of Oregon Wrestling's victories all the time."
A member of Theta Pi Beta throughout his studies, Kesey graduated from the University of Oregon with B.A. in speech and communications in 1957. Increasingly marginalized by the writing and writing program of most of his majors, he began taking literature classes in the second half of his college career with James B. Hall, a cosmopolitan alumni of Iowa Writers' Workshop who previously taught at Cornell University and later served as a provost of College V at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Hall took Kesey as his protégé and cultivated his interest in literary fiction, introducing Kesey (whose reading interest is hitherto limited to science fiction) to Ernest Hemingway's works and other paragraphs of literary modernism. After the last of several short summers as a struggling actor in Los Angeles, he published his first short story ("First Week of September") on Northwest Review and successfully applied to the highly selective Woodrow Wilson. National Fellowship for the academic year 1958-59.
Unbeknownst to Kesey, who appealed to Hall, the maverick literary critic Leslie Fiedler (then based at Montana University) successfully imported a regional alliance committee to select Kesey "rough" with more traditional people from Reed College and other elites. institution. Since he lacked the prerequisites for working to a traditional master's degree in English as a communication majors, Kesey was elected to enroll in a non-degree program at the Falling Creative Writing Center at Stanford University. While studying and working in the Stanford neighborhood over the next five years, most of them spent time as residents of Perry Lane (a bohemian history bag adjacent to the university golf course), he developed a lifelong intimate friendship with fellow writer Ken Babbs, Larry McMurtry, Wendell Berry, Ed McClanahan, Gurney Norman, and Robert Stone.
During the initial fellowship year, Kesey often clashed with the director of the Center of Wallace Stegner, who regarded the young writer as "a very talented illiterate" and refused Kesey's plea for the department Stegner Fellowship before allowing her presence as Woodrow Wilson Fellow. Strengthening this perception, Stegner's representative, Richard Scowcroft, later recalled that "both Wally and I think he has a very important talent." According to Stone, Stegner "sees Kesey... as a threat to civilization and intellectualism and tranquility" and continues to reject the application of Kesey's Stegner Fellowship for the period 1959-60 and 1960-61.
Nevertheless, Kesey received a $ 2,000 Harper-Saxton Prize for her ongoing first novel (Rejected Zoo) and audited a post-graduate seminar - an honor given to the former Stegner Fellows, though Kesey only secured her place by claiming a fake Scowcroft that her colleague (on Saturday through 1960) "has said that he can attend classes for free" - through the 1960-61 period. The course was originally taught in that year by the Viking Press editorial consultant and the Missing Generation eminence, Malcolm Cowley, who was "always happy to see" Kesey and fellow auditor Tillie Olsen. Cowley succeeded the next quarter by Irish short story specialist Frank O'Connor; frequent quarrels between O'Connor and Kesey eventually sparked his departure from the classroom. While under Cowley's guidance, he began to compile and train a script that would evolve into One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Reflecting on this period in a 1999 interview with Robert K. Elder, Kesey recalled, "I am too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie."
Experiments with psychoactive drugs
At the invitation of neighbor Perry Lane and psychology graduate student Stanford Vik Lovell, an acquaintance of Richard Alpert and Allen Ginsberg, Kesey volunteered to take part in what turned out to be CIA funded research under the protection of the MKULTRA Project, a very high secret. military program, at the Menlo Park Veteran Hospital where he works as a night maid. This project studies the effects of psychoactive drugs, especially LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, aMT, and DMT in humans. Kesey wrote many detailed reports of her experience with these drugs, both during the study and in the personal experimental years that followed.
Kesey's role as a medical experiment pig, as well as her job at the Veterans Administration hospital, inspired her to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The success of this book, as well as the destruction of Perry Lane's cabin in August 1963, allowed him to move into a wooden house at 7940 La Honda Road in La Honda, California, a rural village in the Santa Cruz Mountains fifteen miles west of Stanford University campus. He often entertained friends and many others with parties he called "Acid Tests," which included music (including Anonymous Anonymous artist Stanford from America and favorite band Kesey, Grateful Dead), black lights, glowing paint, strobe lights , LSD, and other psychedelic effects. These parties are depicted in several Ginsberg poems and serve as the basis for the Tom Wolfe Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, an early example of a nonfiction novel. Other first-hand accounts of the Acid Tests appear at Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs by Hunter S. Thompson and memoir Hell's Angels 1967 Freewheelin Frank, Secretary of Hell's Angels (Frank Reynolds; ghostwrite by Michael McClure).
One Fly Above Cuckoo's Nest
While still enrolled at the University of Oregon in 1957, Kesey wrote End of the Fall ; according to Rick Dogson, the novel "focuses on the exploits of college athletes by telling the story of a football midfielder who has second thoughts about the game." Although Kesey came to consider unpublished works as juveniles, a quote is presented as an example of the Stanford Creative Writing Center application.
During the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship year, Kesey wrote Zoo , a novel about beatniks living in the North Beach community of San Francisco, but never published.
Inspiration for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest came while working on a night shift with Gordon Lish at the Menlo Park Veteran Hospital. There, Kesey often spent time talking with patients, sometimes under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs by which she volunteered to experiment. Kesey does not believe that these patients are crazy, but rather because the community has pushed them out because they do not fit the conventional ideas of how people should act and behave. Published under Cowley's guidance in 1962, the novel was instantly successful; in 1963, it was adapted into a successful stage play by Dale Wasserman, and in 1975, Milo? Forman directs screen adaptations, winning the "Big Five" Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor (Jack Nicholson), Best Actress (Louise Fletcher), Best Director (Forman) and Best Adaptation Scenario (Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman).
Kesey was originally involved in filming, but left two weeks into production. He claimed to have never seen the film because of a dispute about $ 20,000 he initially paid for his film rights. Kesey hates the fact that, unlike the book, this movie is not narrated by the character of Chief Bromden, and she disagrees with Jack Nicholson who plays Randle McMurphy (he wants Gene Hackman). Nevertheless, Faye Kesey has stated that her husband generally supports the film and is happy that the movie was made.
Happy Pranksters
When the publication of his second novel, Sometimes the Great Notion in 1964, his presence was needed in New York, Kesey, Neal Cassady, and others in a group of friends whom they called Merry Pranksters took a cross- on a school bus dubbed Next. This journey, described in the Kool-Aid Electric Test Test (and later in the Kesey scenario that is not produced, Further Investigations) is a group effort to create art from everyday life, and experience American roads temporary high in LSD. In an interview after arriving in New York, Kesey was quoted as saying, "The sense of communication in this country has almost stopped growing, but we found when we left, the easier it was to make contact with people. different without being a threat. "A large number of recordings were filmed on 16mm cameras during the voyage which remained largely invisible until the release of Alex Gibney's Magic Trip in 2011.
After the bus journey, Pranksters had a party they called the Acid Tests around the San Francisco Bay Area from 1965 to 1966. Many Pranksters lived in Kesey's residence at La Honda. In New York, Cassady introduced Kesey to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who later turned it into Timothy Leary. Sometimes Great Notion inspired a 1970 movie starring and directed by Paul Newman; was nominated for two Academy Awards, and in 1972 was the first film shown by the new HBO television network, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
Kesey was arrested at La Honda, California, for possession of marijuana in 1965. In an attempt to mislead the police, he forged a suicide by having his friend leave his truck on the road on the cliff edge near Eureka, along with an intricate suicide note, written by Pranksters. Kesey escaped to Mexico behind a friend's car. He returned to the United States eight months later. On January 17, 1966, Kesey was sentenced to six months to be served in San Mateo County prison in Redwood City, California. Two nights later, he was arrested again, this time with Carolyn Adams, smoking a marijuana on the roof of Telegraph Hill's Stewart Brand house in San Francisco. At his release, he moved back to the family farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, in the Willamette Valley, where he spent the rest of his life. He wrote many articles, books (mostly articles), and short stories during that time.
Death son
In 1984, Kesey's twenty-year-old son, Jed, a wrestler for the University of Oregon, suffered a severe head injury on his way to the tournament when the team van fell after sliding out of the highway; two days after being declared dead brain, his parents gave permission for his organs to be donated.
The death of Jed greatly affected Kesey, who later referred to Jed as a victim of a policy that had starved the funding team. He wrote to Senator Mark Hatfield, "And I began to get angry, Senator, I finally found out where the mistakes should be put: that the money we spend on national defense does not defend us from real and close criminals, the horrible ones, criminals of ignorance, and cancer, and heart disease and road deaths.How many school buses are equipped with seatbelts with money spent on one of the 16-inch shells? "
At the Grateful Dead concert soon after the death of promoter Bill Graham, Kesey delivered a speech, saying that Graham had donated $ 1,000 for a memorial to Jed at the top of Mount Pisgah, near Kesey's house in Pleasant Hill. Ken Kesey donated $ 33,395 to buy the right bus for the school wrestling team to replace the chicken van that fell off the cliff.
Last year
Kesey was diagnosed with diabetes in 1992. In 1994, she toured with Pranksters Merry members, doing a musical drama she wrote about the millennium called Twister: A Reality Ritual. Many old and new friends and families appeared to support Pranksters on this tour, which took them from Seattle's Bumbershoot along the West Coast, including a two-night run-out at The Fillmore in San Francisco to Boulder, Colorado, where they persuaded (or concocted ) Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg to perform with them.
Kesey especially maintains her home life in Pleasant Hill, preferring to make artistic contributions on the Internet or holding a ritual revival in the spirit of the Acid Tests. In the official release of The Closing of Winterland (2003), which documented the monumental New Year's 1978/1979 concert at Winterland Arena in San Francisco, Kesey was featured in an inter-set interview.
On August 14, 1997, Kesey and Pranksters attended the Phish concert at Darien Lake, New York. Kesey and Pranksters appeared on stage with the band and performed a dance-trance-hour session involving several characters from The Wizard of Oz and Frankenstein.
In June 2001, Kesey was invited and accepted as the keynote speaker at The Evergreen State College annual event. His last major work was an essay for Rolling Stone magazine calling for peace after the 9/11 attacks.
Death
In 1998, health problems began to weaken Kesey, starting with a stroke that year. On October 25, 2001, Kesey underwent surgery on her liver to remove the tumor. He did not recover from the operation and died of complications on 10 November 2001, at the age of 66 years.
Legacy
The movie Gerry (2002) is dedicated to Ken Kesey.
Kesey Square is located in downtown Eugene, Oregon.
Maps Ken Kesey
Work
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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