Ken Kesey Biograrphy

Ken Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado, and brought up in Eugene, Oregon. His father worked in the creamery business, in which he was eventually successful after founding the Eugene Farmers Cooperative. Kesey spent his early years hunting, fishing, swimming; he learned to box and wrestle, and he was a star football player. He studied at the University of Oregon, where he acted in college plays. On graduating he won a scholarship to Stanford University. Kesey soon dropped out, joined the counterculture movement, and began experimenting with drugs. In 1956 he married his school sweetheart, Faye Haxby.
At a Veterans' Administration hospital in Menlo Park, California, Kesey was paid as a volunteer experimental subject, taking mind-altering drugs on Tuesdays and reporting their effects. The supersecret project, called MK-ULTRA, was organized by CIA. Kesey got $20 a week. Some of the drugs, which included magic mushroom capsules, mescaline, amphetamines, and LSD, he took to his home. These experiences - and a vision of an Indian sweeping there the floor - formed the background for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, set in a mental hospital. Kesey took peyote and his favorite, LSD. With his new, increased perception, Kesey felt being "dimensional", explaining in his words, "I saw that everything that you see from this position, if you're also able to see it from over here, you've got two views of it."
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest is narrated by Chief Bromden, a paranoid schizophrenic, who is six feet, eight inches tall, a half-American Indian. He lets people think he is a deaf mute. Into his world enters the petty criminal and prankster Randall Patrick McMurphy with his efforts to change the bureaucratic system of the institution, ruled by Big Nurse Ratched, a female Big Brother. McMurphy is an involuntary and anarchic patient - the others are there more or less voluntarily. The conflict between Nurse Ratched and McMurphy becomes a battle of totalitarianism and...