Ken Kesey's first and best known novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), the story of an unlikely redeemer who triumphs over the authoritarian "Combine" run by Big Nurse Ratched, became the credo of an entire generation of rebels; and in the late twentieth century it continues to command the interest of new generations of readers with its comedic virtuosity.

The novel's genesis seems to confirm Kesey's belief that life is a form of art. As a graduate student at Stanford University in the late 1950s, Kesey learned from a fellow student about experiments with "psychomimetic" drugs at the Veteran's Hospital in Menlo Park and volunteered to be a paid subject. Kesey—by his own admission in Kesey's Garage Sale (1973) "a jock, never even been drunk but that one night in my frat house...