Ken Kesey
1 book analyzed
Biography
Ken Kesey (1935–2001) was born in Colorado and raised in Oregon, where the novel is set. He attended Stanford's creative writing program on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, where he was working on the novel when he volunteered in 1960 for a CIA-funded program at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital — part of Project MKUltra, the government's covert research into psychedelic drugs for potential use in interrogation and psychological warfare. He was paid to take mescaline, LSD, Ditran, IT-290, and other psychoactive substances and report his experiences. He found the work so interesting that he took a night-shift job as an orderly at the same psychiatric ward. The patients he met, the institutional routines he observed, and the altered states he experienced under government-administered psychedelics all went directly into the novel. He later became the leader of the Merry Pranksters, a countercultural group who drove across America in a painted bus, distributing LSD and staging 'Acid Tests' — events that helped catalyze the 1960s psychedelic movement.