Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters
In 1959 Ken Kesey, a graduate student in creative writing at Stanford University, volunteered to take part in a government drug research programme at Menlo Park Veterans Hospital that tested a variety of psychoactive drugs such as LSD, which was legal at the time. Over a period of several weeks, Kesey took these hallucinogens and wrote of his drug-induced experiences for government researchers. From this experience, Kesey wrote his most celebrated novel, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, and began his own experimentations with psychedelic drugs. His goal was to break through conformist thought and ultimately create changes in American society. In the early 1960s, Neal Cassady showed up to meet the famous author and became the most celebrated member of Kesey’s group, the Merry Pranksters. Much of the hippie culture that would happen in San Francisco in the late sixties can be traced back to the Merry Pranksters who openly used psychoactive drugs, wore outrageous clothes, performed bizarre acts of street theatre, and engaged in peaceful confrontation. As Kesey put it: “What we hoped was that we could stop the coming end of the world.” By 1966, when Kesey had been arrested as a fugitive from the law, he denounced the powers of LSD as temporary and delusional, but nothing he said could stop the psychedelic era that was about to explode in San Francisco.
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest was a critical and commercial success. It was read as a cautionary tale that viewed society, represented by Big Nurse, as a cold, formidable negation of all that is free, open and nonconformist. McMurphy, escaping hard labour at a penal work farm, tries to rekindle a spark of life among his fellow patients but is thwarted at each step by the cold, calculating Nurse Ratched, who ultimately curtails McMurphy’s free wheeling ways. From this book, Kesey gained the notoriety and the income necessary to draw together his motley band of Merry Pranksters, who through their many antics and travels, set the stage for the Psychedelic Era that was to follow. A critically acclaimed novel that is still taught at schools today, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest remains Ken Kesey’s most popular work.
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