Word: kesey
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...Kesey...
Before he became a character in American literature, Ken Kesey was a novelist. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) and Sometimes a Great Notion (1964) put him in the company of the young and the promising. He was a big man (a former wrestling champ at the University of Oregon) with a big talent. His family roots were in farming and logging; the rest is classic American tumbleweed. From Wallace Stegner's writing classes at Stanford, Kesey drifted to the San Francisco Bay Area, the playpen of countercultures. A bit young to be a founding beatnik...
...immobile and rusting on Kesey's farm in Pleasant Hill, Ore., the vehicle symbolizes the built-in obsolescence of 1960s enthusiasms. The same can be said for Demon Box, a collection of new and previously published magazine pieces about the good old days, departed friends, family, the pull of the soil and the lure of dope. Spruced up and polished, these writings impress and entertain but seem like an attempt to squeeze a few more miles out of a writer who has either run out of gas or has been stalled by too many chemical additives...
Names are changed to protect the guilty as well as the innocent. The result is a fictionalized autobiography in which Kesey is called Devlin Deboree, a once celebrated novelist who served a short jail sentence in California for marijuana possession. Tracking the cast requires some familiarity with Beat Generation hagiography. The names Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso are included in a straightforward litany. But Neal Cassady, the loquacious speed demon, is swathed in multiple fictions. He is called Houlihan by Kesey-Deboree, who complicates matters by saying that Houlihan, rather than the real Cassady, was the model...
...diethylamide was entirely legal in California until October 1966, and the mind-expanding drug made popular in these parts by ex-Prof. Timothy Leary fueled the "Hashberry" from start to finish. Publicly-advertised acid tests--group tripping experiences organized by novelist Ken ("One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest") Kesey and his Merry Pranksters--spread the wonder drug from the province of a few enlightened intellectuals to the grasp of any who wanted to know...