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Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2001 23:51:18 -0800
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: Novelist Ken Kesey is dead at 66
Novelist Ken Kesey is dead at 66
<http://msnbc.com/news/655655.asp?cp1=1>
Author of 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' was pioneer of counterculture
GRANTS PASS, Ore., Nov. 10 Ken Kesey, the psychedelic pioneer who wrote
the 1960s novels "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Sometimes a Great
Notion," and who became famous as a counterculture figure leading his
LSD-fueled Merry Pranksters on a cross-country bus ride, died Saturday from
complications following liver cancer surgery.
Kesey died at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene, Ore., two weeks after
surgery to remove 40 percent of his liver. Kesey, who was 66, "passed away
peacefully in his sleep" with his family at his side, according to a
nursing supervisor. His liver cancer had been complicated by diabetes and a
minor stroke he suffered four years ago.
"He's gone too soon and he will leave a big gap. Always the leader, now he
leads the way again," said Ken Babbs, a longtime friend.
After studying writing at Stanford University, Kesey burst onto the
literary scene in 1962 with "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," followed
quickly with "Sometimes a Great Notion" in 1964, then went 28 years before
publishing his third major novel.
In 1964, he rode across the country in an old school bus named Furthur
driven by Neal Cassady, hero of Jack Kerouac's Beat Generation classic, "On
The Road."
The bus was filled with pals who called themselves the Merry Pranksters and
sought enlightenment through the psychedelic drug LSD.
The odyssey was immortalized in Tom Wolfe's 1968 account, "The Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test."
"Anyone trying to get a handle on our times had better read Kesey," Charles
Bowden wrote when the Los Angeles Times honored Kesey's lifetime of work
with the Robert Kirsh Award in 1991. "And unless we get lucky and things
change, they're going to have to read him a century from now too."
HATED FILM OF 'CUCKOO'S NEST'
"Sometimes a Great Notion," widely considered Kesey's greatest book, told
the saga of the Stamper clan, rugged independent loggers carving a living
out of the Oregon woods under the motto, "Never Give a Inch." It was made
into a movie starring Henry Fonda and Paul Newman.
But "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" became much more widely known, thanks
to a movie that Kesey hated. It tells the story of Randle P. McMurphy, who
feigned insanity to get off a prison farm, only to be lobotomized when he
threatened the authority of the mental hospital.
The 1974 Milos Forman movie swept the Academy Awards for best picture, best
director (Forman), best actor (Jack Nicholson) and best actress (Louise
Fletcher), but Kesey sued the producers because it took the viewpoint away
from the character of the schizophrenic Indian, Chief Bromden.
Kesey based the story on experiences working at the Veterans Administration
hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., while attending Wallace Stegner's writing
seminar at Stanford.
While Kesey continued to write a variety of short autobiographical fiction,
magazine articles and children's books, he didn't produce another major
novel until "Sailor Song" in 1992, his long-awaited Alaska book, which he
described as a story of "love at the end of the world."
"This is a real old-fashioned form," he said of the novel. "But it is sort
of the Vatican of the art. Every once in a while you've got to go get a
blessing from the pope."
PSYCHEDLIC PRANKSTER
Kesey considered pranks part of his art, and in 1990 he took a poke at the
Smithsonian Institution by announcing he would drive his old psychedelic
bus to Washington, D.C., to give it to the nation. The museum recognized
the bus as a new one, with no particular history, and rejected the gift.
In a 1990 interview with The Associated Press, Kesey said it had become
harder to write since he became famous.
"When I was working on 'Sometimes a Great Notion,' one of the reasons I
could do it was because I was unknown," he said. "I could get all those
balls in the air and keep them up there and nothing would come along and
distract me. Now there's a lot of stuff happens that happens because I'm
famous. And famous isn't good for a writer. You don't observe well when
you're being observed."
A graduate of the University of Oregon, Kesey returned to his alma mater in
1990 to teach novel writing. With each student assigned a character and
writing under the gun, the class produced "Caverns," under the pen name OU
Levon, or UO Novel spelled backward.
"The life of it comes from making people believe that these people are
drawing breath and standing up, casting shadows, and living lives and
feeling agonies," Kesey said then. "And that's a trick. It's a glorious
trick. And it's a trick that you can be taught. It's not something, just a
thing that comes from the muses."
FOND OF PERFORMING
Among his proudest achievements was seeing "Little Tricker the Squirrel
Meets Big Double the Bear," which he wrote from an Ozark mountain tale told
by his grandmother, included on the 1991 Library of Congress list of
suggested children's books.
"I'm up there with Dr. Seuss," he crowed.
Fond of performing, Kesey sometimes recited the story in top hat and tails
accompanied by an orchestra, throwing a shawl over his head while assuming
the character of his grandmother reciting the nursery rhyme, "One Flew Over
the Cuckoo's Nest."
Other works include "Kesey's Garage Sale" and "Demon Box," collections of
essays and short stories, and "Further Inquiry," another look at the 1964
bus trip in which the soul of Cassady is put on trial. "The Sea Lion,"
another children's book, told the story of a crippled boy who saves his
Northwest Indian tribe from an evil spirit by invoking the gift-giving
ceremony of potlatch. Kesey, also given credit for turning the legendary
rock band the Grateful Dead on to LSD, continued to write until going in
for surgery two weeks ago, said a friend, Philip Dietz, who calls himself
"the last Prankster."
"We'd get together on the weekends and play the Thunder Machine," said
Dietz, who lives near Kesey and his family farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon.
The Thunder Machine, an amalgam of an old Thunderbird fender, piano
strings, a smoke machine and other mixing gear, was a touchstone for
Prankster jam sessions and has been featured in Grateful Dead concerts.
Kesey was also working on turning film footage of the Furthur odyssey into
a trio of movies, and he was fascinated by the promise that the Internet
could be used as a kind of "pirate" medium to broadcast performance art and
bypass publishing houses.
EARLY YEARS
Born in La Junta, Colo., on Sept. 17, 1935, Kesey moved in 1943 from the
dry prairie to his grandparents' dairy farm in Oregon's lush Willamette
Valley. He earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of
Oregon, where he also was a wrestler.
Kesey encountered drugs in 1959 when, as a struggling writer studying at
Stanford University, he signed up for experiments at the Menlo Park
Veterans Administration Hospital to test the effects of LSD and other
hallucinogens.
After serving four months in jail for a marijuana bust in California, he
set down roots in Pleasant Hill in 1965 with his high school sweetheart,
Faye, and reared four children. Their rambling red barn house with the big
Pennsylvania Dutch star on the side became a landmark of the psychedelic
era, attracting visits from myriad strangers in tie-dyed clothing seeking
enlightenment.
The bus Furthur rusted away in a boggy pasture while Kesey raised beef cattle.
PRANKSTERS STICKING TOGETHER
Kesey died just a week after fellow Prankster Sandy Lehmann-Haupt, who
passed away of a heart attack at age 59.
In a recent interview, Kesey had said the Pranksters "still stick pretty
close together."
"When you don't know where you're going, you have to stick together just in
case someone gets there," he said.
Kesey was diagnosed with diabetes in 1992.
His son Jed, killed in a 1984 van accident on a road trip with the
University of Oregon wrestling team, was buried in the back yard at
Pleasant Hill.
Kesey is survived by his wife, Faye; his son, Zane; his daughters, Shannon
and Sunshine, and three grandchildren.
'SAYING GOODBYE'
Zane Kesey said the author spent a last afternoon on Monday at his farm in
Pleasant Hill.
"He was doing really well and he came home," he said. "It was a beautiful
day and he just walked around, then he lay down on his back on the porch
and looked up at the sky for a while. It was like he was saying goodbye."
"He had a full life, that's for sure. He didn't just sit around," said Zane
Kesey, who is 40.
Ken Kesey died with a major project in the works, a film taken during the
Pranksters bus trip. Two parts have been finished and were being sold
through Kesey's Web site, www.key-z.com.
His son also said Kesey had several unpublished works, including the
completion to his partially published "Seven Prayers of Grandma Whittier"
and a book he wrote while he was in jail for four months for a marijuana
bust in the mid-60s.
His son said "he was always writing. He was the total archivist."
When asked in a recent interview if he had any regrets about his colorful
past, Kesey replied: "Anybody who says they have no regrets is either a
dimwit or a liar probably both."
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