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Ken Kesey |
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Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) was a critical success from the beginning. Its popularity, particularly among college students, has grown steadily, with paperback sales soaring into the millions. Its apparent message of contemporary man's need to get in touch with his world, to open the doors of perception, to enjoy spontaneous sensuous experience and resist the manipulative forces of a technological society, has had wide appeal. His second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), a larger and more complex work, also a best-seller adapted for film, has been less read and has failed to capture the college audience the way his first novel did. Aside from his novels, Kesey attained notoriety as a style setter for much of West Coast psychedelia in the 1960s. As the leader of the Merry Pranksters, described by one newspaperman as a "day-glo guerrilla squad for the LSD revolution in California," he turned from writing to search for new forms of expression induced by drugs--forms of expression in which there would be no separation between himself and the audience; it would be all one experience, with the senses opened wide.
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