Like Mark Twain, Kesey celebrates the oral tall tale tradition and derides intellectual pomposity. Therefore he and Ken Babbs chose to bring to life their "three spectral riders out of the old tall tales, told over hot coffee around a warm campfire, instead of the cold facts and half-baked truths served up by library stacks." The novel grew from Kesey's recollection of a story his father told him when he was fourteen — a yarn accompanied by the sounds of crackling flames and the bubbling concoction of Vienna sausages, beans, and sardines. Then when Kesey was a junior at the University of Oregon working on a screenwriting class assignment to produce an outline for a documentary on a town, he visited the Pendleton Round Up. There he met David Sleeping-Good, a thin Indian who introduced him to hot frybread and in a teepee recounted his grandfather's version of...