Author Ken Kesey, icon of the 1960s drug culture, dies

Ken Kesey, the novelist famous for "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" who became a prophet of the psychedelic era when he led an LSD-fueled band of free spirits on a cross-country bus trip in the early 1960s, died yesterday at a hospital in Eugene. He was 66.

His death came two weeks after cancer surgery to remove nearly half of his liver.

Mr. Kesey found resounding critical acclaim with "Cuckoo's Nest," a darkly humorous parable set in a mental hospital. Published in 1962, his first novel resonated with a generation weary of the conformist 1950s and receptive to its message about the dangers to individual freedom and expression.

He also was the leader of the Merry Pranksters, who commanded a 1939 school bus painted in Day-Glo hues to spread their love of hallucinogenics and a let-it-be attitude. Their exploits were celebrated in Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," which became an underground classic soon after its 1968 publication. Mr. Kesey emerged as a countercultural folk hero.

"He was very definitely the person who set the tone of the entire psychedelic or hippie movement," Wolfe said yesterday by phone from Philadelphia. "Ken had this expression: 'It's time to move off dead center.' ... A whole generation moved off dead center, a whole lot of things changed, from the breakdown in the walls of formality between teachers and students to the use of hallucinogenic drugs."

"He did change the world," said Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir, a longtime friend. "People these days are a lot more willing to question authority than they were before he came along. He was a great man, a giant beyond literary terms. He was and remains for me a boundless spirit."

Together with Timothy Leary, another guru of the '60s, Mr. Kesey was a major figure in "a general throwing aside of constraints, which made a tremendous difference in American society," Wolfe said.

Mr. Kesey's second and most successful novel, "Sometimes a Great Notion," followed closely behind "Cuckoo's Nest," in 1964. Over the next three decades, he would write only one more major novel, "Sailor Song," in 1992.

He seemed to relish confounding conventional expectations, abandoning writing for long stretches while he pursued other interests — performing with the Grateful Dead, giving readings of his children's stories, making videos out of the miles of film he and other Pranksters shot during what they came to call the Intrepid Trip.

"He was a very kinetic individual," said novelist Larry McMurtry, who studied writing with Mr. Kesey at Stanford University in the late 1950s.

"It is as a writer that I think of Ken. (But) he had something of the farmer in him, something of the director in him. And the Pranksters on the bus putting on hats and brightening up the lives of people in many communities — it seemed to please him."

"Kesey was the trickster par excellence," said Robert Faggen, an associate professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College, who wrote the introduction to the 40th anniversary edition of "Cuckoo's Nest" to be published by Viking in January. "He was always challenging and subverting those around him, challenging the masquerade of settled life."

His literary output was not immense and his later works were often dismissed, sometimes savagely, by critics who suggested that his years of drug experimentation had ruined his writing.

But there was a common strand, which he once described this way.

"There's a snake in the grass. Sometimes it's the government. Sometimes it's evil spirits. Sometimes it's some part of yourself," he told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. "But there's an evil force and it attacks you (where) you are most vulnerable."

Art, he believed, was the opposition force and held the possibility of salvation. "That's what 'Cuckoo's Nest' is about. That's what 'Great Notion' is about: The small trying to stand up against a great force. But that force is getting stronger."

Mr. Kesey was born in La Junta, Colo., the son of dairy farmers. As a child he moved with his family to Oregon where he developed a great love of the outdoors, swimming, fishing and riding river rapids. He was voted most likely to succeed when he graduated from high school in Springfield.

He went on to the University of Oregon in Eugene, where he made his mark as a wrestler and as an actor in campus plays. After graduating in 1957, he spent some time as a bit actor in Hollywood.

He gave up acting for the writing program at Stanford, which he attended on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. He was taught by Wallace Stegner and Malcolm Cowley, the legendary editor of both Faulkner and Jack Kerouac.

In 1959 he signed up as a paid volunteer at a Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park, Calif., for drug experiments, including LSD, and was so entranced by the mind-altering capabilities of the drugs he was offered that he sought to extend his access by becoming a night attendant in the mental ward of the hospital.

His experiences provided the grim grist for "Cuckoo's Nest."

The story is told through the eyes of Chief Bromden, an American Indian electric-shocked into silence. Nurse Ratched, who ruled the ward with drugs and terror, was a symbol of repression and dehumanization. Randle Patrick McMurphy, the cocky con man who feigned craziness to escape a prison term, rebelled against the asylum's ridiculous rules and incited other inmates to rise up against the tyranny. But he winds up paying dearly, lobotomized into submission.

The novel's power came in its timing, critic Pauline Kael once wrote. It "preceded the university turmoil, Vietnam, drugs, the counterculture. Yet it contained the prophetic essence of that whole period of revolutionary politics going psychedelic, and much of what it said ... has entered the consciousness of many — possibly most — Americans."

"Cuckoo's Nest" was made into a play and adapted for the movies. The film, which was directed by Milos Forman and starred Jack Nicholson as McMurphy, swept the 1976 Academy Awards, winning five Oscars.

But Mr. Kesey was barely credited for its success, which was just as well because he abhorred the filmmakers' abandonment of Chief Bromden as the narrator. He earned only $28,000 from the movie, which grossed millions, and swore never to see it.

After two solid years spent writing "Sometimes a Great Notion," which was later made into a movie starring Henry Fonda and Paul Newman, Mr. Kesey was ready for adventure.

The Pranksters had assembled and began hosting "happenings." Initially private parties, they evolved into large public events or "acid tests" that included light shows, psychedelic art and music, appreciated while under the influence of drugs.

Soon they cooked up the cross-country tour, which would end in New York for the publication of Mr. Kesey's second novel.

They outfitted the vintage International Harvester school bus with stereophonic and video equipment and speakers loud enough to broadcast to the passing world. They painted wild designs in iridescent yellows, oranges, blues, reds. Then they adorned it with two signs. The one in front announced its name, "Further." The one in back cautioned "Weird Load."

"The Pranksters were now out among them," Wolfe wrote, "and it was exhilarating — look at the mothers staring! — and there was going to be holy terror in the land."

Mr. Kesey met Kerouac during the trip. He also tried to meet Leary, but the latter was in the midst of a three-day meditation and would not take a break. Music was blaring, drugs were flowing, and Mr. Kesey, dubbed Chief Prankster, was at the roiling center.

Mr. Kesey came to be seen as a bridge between the Beats of the 1950s and the hippies who came after. It was an honor he viewed with typical Keseyian humor.

"To be the bridge from the Beatniks to the hippies shows that we don't exist in either world. We lie in the cracks between them. We think of ourselves as crackers," he told the Times-Union of Albany, N.Y. earlier this year.

He is survived by wife, Faye; a son, Zane; daughters Shannon Smith and Sunshine Kesey; his mother, Geneva Jolley; a brother, Chuck; three grandchildren, and several nieces and nephews.

Material from Knight-Ridder Newspapers is included in this report.