1935-
Novelist

Nonconformist Writer.

During the 1960s writer Ken Kesey was as famous for his promotion of the hippie lifestyle as he was for anything he published. Stepping into the shoes vacated by the Beat Generation of the 1950s, Kesey and his circle of followers, called the Merry Pranksters, stood out even among nonconformists in an age of rebellion against conformity.

Novels.

Kesey became famous at age twenty-seven with his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962). The protagonist, Randle J. McMurphy, is a patient in a mental hospital. Though the consequences of his actions are sometimes disastrous, to many readers he was a figure admirable for his dramatic challenges to convention and authority. This stance made the character, and Kesey by extension, popular with young readers in particular. Kesey's next novel, Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), was less successful, perhaps because its conservative Oregonians were...