Ken Kesey Hasn’t Left Us; He’s Just Dead

Ken Kesey wrote the Great American Novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, published in 1964. Well, okay, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn was pretty good, too. Twain was certainly more prolific. Kesey’s published works other than his first, and more famous novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, include the novel Sailor’s Song, the historical novel Last Go Round, set in the 1911 Pendleton Round-Up, plus assorted miscellany, some collected in Kesey’s Garage Sale. (Paul Newman’s first directorial effort was the film adaptation of Sometimes a Great Notion.)

Kesey is also famous – or infamous – for the Acid Tests of the 1960s, bringing LSD and the Grateful Dead to notoriety. Kesey was the ringleader of the Merry Band of Pranksters – “Too young to be a beatnik and too old to be a hippy” – and the instigator of their road trip, in the psychedelically-painted bus “Further,” to the New York World’s Fair. Tom Wolfe chronicled the excursion in his classic of “new journalism,” The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Ken Kesey eventually had enough of the lifestyle and came to the realization that Pranksters was another name for moochers. He took his bus back home to his farm near Eugene and spent a relatively quiet rest of his life. He died in 2001.

Further – also known as “Furthur,” after decades of deterioration on Kesey’s farm, has been restored. A feature-length film of the Merry Pranksters adventures, “Magic Trip,” has been released and is available on DVD.

Postscript:

Ken Kesey was a champion wrestler at the University of Oregon. His son Jed was also. On the way to a match in 1984, the team’s bus, previously used to transport chickens and lacking seat belts, slid off an icy road. Jed was kept on life support for two days until his parents, Ken and Faye, gave permission to shut it off. Twenty-year-old Jed Kesey had previously signed an organ-donor authorization. Twelve of his organs went to others. The Keseys sued the National College Athletics Association and settled for $70,000. They used the money to buy a new bus for the U of O wrestling team. Read Ken Kesey’s letter about his son.

 

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.