Ken Kesey was born on 17 September 1935 in La Junta, Colorado, to Fred and Geneva Smith Kesey. His father moved the family to Oregon, where he began a highly successful marketing cooperative for dairy farmers, the Eugene Farmers Cooperative, and built it into the biggest dairy operation in the area, retailing under the name Darigold. Ken Kesey was voted "most likely to succeed" at high school in Springfield, Oregon. He attended the University of Oregon and was active in fraternities and sports, becoming a star wrestler in the 174-pound class. On 20 May 1956, he married Faye Haxby, a girl he had known since high school, and the following year, after his graduation in 1957 from the University of Oregon, they went to Los Angeles. Kesey had the idea of becoming a movie actor, but instead he started working on a novel about college athletics, never published, titled "End of Autumn."
In the fall of 1957, Jack Kerouac's On the Road was published, and as an aspiring young novelist Kesey was impressed by the vivid portrait of Neal Cassady. Kesey has said that he read the novel three times, and (writing about himself in the third person) he remembered that "like all the other candidates for beatitude, he had prowled North Beach's famous hangouts--City Lights, The Place, The Coffee Gallery, The Bagel Shop--hoping to catch a glimpse of that lightning-minded character that Kerouac had called Dean Moriarty in On the Road, and that John Clellon Holmes had named Hart Kennedy in Go , maybe even to eavesdrop on one of his high-octane hipalogues, perhaps even get a chance to be a big-eyed passenger on one of his wild rapping runs around the high spots of magic San Francisco."
Kesey started a second novel about bohemian life in North Beach, titled "Zoo," but, instead of joining the writers' community in San Francisco, he enrolled on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship as a graduate student in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University during the academic year 1958-1959.
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