Jed kesey biography

One icy morning in January of 1984, as the University of Oregon’s wrestling team headed on a bus to their next tournament in Pullman, Washington, the driver lost control of the vehicle on a mountain road and it tumbled through the guardrail and over a 300-foot cliff. Tragically, not all survived. One boy, Lorenzo West, was killed on impact; another, twenty-year-old Jed Kesey, was left brain dead. He passed away within days. Shortly after Jed’s funeral at his family’s farm, his father, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey, wrote to five of his closest friends.

*

Pleasant Hill, OR
February 3, 1984

Dear Wendell and Larry and Ed and Bob and Gurnie:

Aw, partners, it’s been a bitch.

I’ve got to write and tell somebody about some stuff and, like I long ago told Larry, you’re the best backboard I know. So indulge me a little; I am but hurt. […]

We built the box ourselves (George Walker, mainly) and dug the hole in a nice spot between the chicken house and the pond (Zane and Jed’s friends, actually). Page found the stone and we designed the etching. You would have been proud, Wendell, especially of the box—clear pine pegged together and trimmed with redwood. The handles of thick hemp rope. And you, Ed, would have appreciated the lining. It was a piece of Tibetan brocade given Mountain Girl by Owsley fifteen years ago, gilt and silver and russet phoenixbird patterns, unfurling in flames. And last month, Bob, Zane was goose hunting in the field across the road and, just like I did years ago after Faye and I were fresh wed, thought he saw a snow goose and mistakenly killed a swan. I told him get it out of sight fast but be sure to pluck and save the down. Susan Butkovitch covered this in satin for the pillow while Faye and MG and Gretch and Candace stitched and stapled the b

American writer and countercultural figure (1935–2001)

Ken Elton Kesey (; September 17, 1935 – November 10, 2001) was an American novelist, essayist and countercultural figure. He considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.

Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado, and grew up in Springfield, Oregon, graduating from the University of Oregon in 1957. He began writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1960 after completing a graduate fellowship in creative writing at Stanford University; the novel was an immediate commercial and critical success when published two years later. During this period, Kesey was used by the CIA without his knowledge in the Project MKULTRA involving hallucinogenic drugs (including mescaline and LSD), which was done to try to make people insane to put them under the control of interrogators.

After One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was published, Kesey moved to nearby La Honda, California, and began hosting "happenings" with former colleagues from Stanford, bohemian and literary figures including Neal Cassady and other friends, who became collectively known as the Merry Pranksters. As documented in Tom Wolfe's 1968 New Journalism book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, some of the parties were promoted to the public as Acid Tests, and integrated the consumption of LSD with multimedia performances. He mentored the Grateful Dead, who were the Acid Tests' house band, and continued to exert a profound influence upon the group throughout their career.

Kesey's second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, was a commercial success that polarized some critics and readers upon its release in 1964. An epic account of the vicissitudes of an Oregon logging family that aspired to the modernist grandeur of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha saga, Kesey regarded it as his magnum opus.

In 1965, after being arrested for marijuana possession and fa

Ken Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado in 1935. The state with which he fell in love and in which he lived for most of his life, however, was Oregon, where his family moved to when he was eleven years old. Kesey’s parents were both hard-working dairy farmers, and their labour-intensive work was perhaps the reason for the two things which Kesey excelled at during high school: football and wrestling. Admired by his peers for his sporting prowess, he was voted in his high school yearbook as ‘most likely to succeed’.

After being awarded a wrestling scholarship to study Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon, Kesey married his high-school sweetheart, Faye Haxby, and eloped with her briefly. Kesey would return to complete his degree in 1957, and he and Faye would remain married for Kesey’s entire life.

While studying at Oregon, Kesey made a few abortive attempts at writing a novel. The remains of one effort, however, were submitted by Kesey as part of an application to the Stanford Creative Writing Program, into which he was accepted in 1958. He clashed repeatedly with the course director, famed writer and environmentalist Wallace Stegner, but remained undeterred and continued to hone his style.

The two pivotal moments in Kesey’s writing career, however, were to happen outside the writers’ workshop. The first was Kesey’s paid participation in a US Army experiment testing the effects of hallucinogenic drugs, including LSD and mescalin. The second and perhaps more significant event was the job Kesey took working the night shift at a psychiatric hospital in California while completing his stint at the writing program. Kesey’s experiences with the patients, whom he believed had been grossly misunderstood by a narrow-minded society, inspired the book for which he would become best known, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which was published in 1962. The novel, about a psychiatric patient called McMurphy who is subjected to deb