Born September 17, 1935
La Junta, Colorado

Died November 10, 2001
Eugene, Oregon

Author and prankster

Ken Kesey. © Ted Streshinsky/Corbis. Reproduced by permission.

Ken Kesey was one of the central figures in the "psychedelic sixties," a decade when various people, including many college students, experimented with mind-altering drugs, such as LSD. Kesey was at the forefront of the cultural explosion in the late 1960s that celebrated joyful expressiveness, the rejection of authority, loud rock music, and drug use. As a cultural figure, Kesey is renowned as the leader of the Merry Pranksters, a ragtag group representing the rowdy, fun-loving, anti-authoritarian nature of the psychedelic era. Their epic cross-country bus trip was chronicled by author Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968). As a novelist, Kesey is best known for two works: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) and Sometimes a Great Notion (1964). Kesey remained a hero to countercultural...