SOURCE: Bowman, David. “Still Crazy after All These Years.” Book (March-April 2002): 34-5.

In the following essay, Bowman summarizes the highlights of Kesey's literary career.

On November 10 last year, Ken Kesey, the leader of the Merry Pranksters, pulled what might be his greatest gag: dying just before the fortieth anniversary of his 1962 classic, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. The novel, which was just republished in a new, anniversary edition, is a 300-page battle of wills between iconoclast Randle Patrick McMurphy and Nurse Ratched (“Big Nurse”), the tyrant in charge of the asylum where McMurphy is feigning insanity in order to beat jail time. It provided, as Kesey's own life eventually would, a transition between the cool beatnik rebellion of the '50s and the hippie bacchanal of the '60s.

Kesey wrote the book in 1959, while working as a night attendant at the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park...