Overview of Ken (Elton) Kesey

DISCovering Authors, 2003 [Overview of the author's works and career.] Ken Kesey, a writer and cultural hero of the psychic frontier, is best known as the author of the widely read novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and the insightful contemporary novel Sometimes a Great Notion. His works are set in California and Oregon, two locations representing two facets of Kesey's experience that provide the major tensions in his works. Oregon represents traditional rural family values and self-reliance inherited from Baptist pioneer stock; California is associated with the countercultural revolution in which Kesey played an important role. Therefore Kesey's name is often associated with the American West Coast and the hippie movement that centered itself there during the 1960s. Though he has since taken a more critical stance in regard to the alternative lifestyle he once championed, Kesey's later works remain haunted by fond references to the uninhibited life he enjoyed as a member of The Merry Pranksters, a group who traveled America in a bus when experimental drug use was at its peak. His novels, plays, screenplays and essays express the author's intrepid quest for heightened consciousness in which he has explored magic, hypnotism, mind-altering or psychoactive drugs, the occult, Eastern religions, and esoteric philosophies. His works also carry forward the American literary traditions of the Transcendentalists and the Beats as well as the frontier humor and vernacular style established by Mark Twain. Kesey was born and raised "a hard-shell Baptist" in Colorado and Oregon, he tells Linda Gaboriau in a Crawdaddy interview. He accompanied his father on many hunting and fishing trips in the Pacific Northwest and developed a deep respect for nature. His love of the outdoors was matched by his fascination with extraordinary experience. After receiving a book of magic in the mail with a set of mail- order Batman decals, he studied theatrical magic and learned to perform illusions. "I . . . did shows all through high school and in college," he tells Gaboriau. "I went from this into ventriloquism (and even had a show on TV), and from ventriloquism into hypnotism. And from hypnotism into dope. But it's always been the same trip, the same kind of search," he says, referring to his quest for heightened consciousness. Kesey auditioned for film roles in Hollywood before entering college at the University of Oregon in Eugene, where he majored in speech and communications, gaining experience in acting and writing for radio and television. An active athlete during both high school and college, he won a scholarship as the outstanding college wrestler in the Northwest. Each of Kesey's interests figure largely in his works. Hunting and fishing are strategically important events in the two major works that established his literary reputation. His characters are physically strong and ready to compete against overwhelming pressure to conform to standards or submit to authorities that oppose their well-being. His style incorporates techniques borrowed from theatre and film such as flashbacks, fade-outs, and jump cuts, and it shows familiarity with the conventions of horror films and popular Westerns. Kesey married his high school sweetheart, Faye Haxby, while at the University of Oregon, and moved to California where he enrolled in Stanford's creative writing program. There he met Wallace Stegner, Richard Scowcroft, Malcolm Cowley, and Frank O'Connorwriters who were also literary criticsand fellow students Wendell Berry, Larry McMurtry and Robert Stone. He also encountered the cultural radicalism that was developing in Perry Lane, a section of Stanford patterned after the haven of the Beat movement in San Francisco's North Beach. According to Free You contributor Vie Lovell, to whom Kesey dedicated One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the Perry Lane group "pioneered what have since become the hall-marks of hippie culture: LSD and other psychedelics too numerous to mention, body painting, light shows and mixed media

presentations, total aestheticism, be-ins, exotic costumes, strobe lights, sexual mayhem, freakouts and the deification of psychoticism, eastern mysticism, and the rebirth of hair." Like many others, Kesey said in a speech on tape from the Kesey archives at the University of Oregon that events at Perry Lane and similar places were a watershed, at the same time both the culmination of civilization to that point, and the fulmination of volatile social forces that would have some impact on all the years to come. When Lovell suggested Kesey take part in the drug experiments being conducted at the Veterans Administration Hospital at Menlo Park, he accepted. There he was paid to ingest various psychoactive drugs and to report their effects. This experience, together with his experiences as an aide at the VA Hospital, led him to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Before finishing this work, now considered a classic representation of American values in conflict, he also produced an unpublished novel about his North Beach experience titled "Zoo," written at Stanford, and eighty pages of story outline for a novel about Perry Lane. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a celebration of the resilience of the human spirit as seen in the characteristically American resistance to corrupt authority. The novel tells how Randle Patrick McMurphy, a cocky, fast-talking inmate of a prison farm who has had himself committed to a mental hospital to avoid work, creates upheaval in the ward that is so efficiently and repressively directed by Nurse Ratched. His self-confidence and irrepressible sense of humor inspire the passive, dehumanized patients to rebel against Big Nurse and the "Combine" of society she represents. McMurphy ultimately sacrifices himself in the process of teaching his fellow patients the saving lessons of laughter and self-reliance. Contemporary audiences have received the work with notable enthusiasm for several decades. In the early 1960s, the novel supplied a critique of an American society that had been portrayed in the 1950s as a lonely crowd of organization men who could achieve affluence only through strict conformity. That critique continued to suit the mood of the 1970s and 1980s because larger themes were involved: the modern technological world as necessarily divorced from nature; contemporary society as repressive; authority as mechanical and destructive; contemporary man as weak, frightened, and sexless, a victim of rational but loveless forces beyond his control. The novel's message that people need to get back in touch with their world, to open doors of perception, to enjoy spontaneous sensuous experience, and to resist the manipulative forces of a technological society was particularly appealing to the young, but not just to them. An admiration for self-reliant action as its own source of authority runs deep in the American psyche. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was a resounding critical success. It became quite popular among young people, and by the 1970s, when it became the contemporary novel most frequently used in college courses, more than a million copies had been sold. American audiences have appreciated the work in each of its incarnations as play, novel, and film. The play version by Dale Wasserman appeared on Broadway with Kirk Douglas starring as McMurphy in 1963 and was revived in 1971; campus productions continue to draw attentive audiences. The film version, directed by Milos Forman and starring Jack Nicholson, was a box office hit and won six Academy Awards in 1975. The novel is widely appreciated for the range of subjects, issues, and disciplines it includes. A 1977 doubleissue of Lex et Scientia, the official journal of the International Academy of Law and Science, contains essays on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest described by editor Ralph Porzio as "a cornucopia of source material from disciplines so numerous and varied as to challenge the mind and imagination." He observes that it treats the areas of psychology, psychiatry, medicine, literature, human relations, drama, art, cosmology, law, religion, American culture, and folk culture through a kaleidoscopic blend of tragedy, pathos, and humor. This rich variety explains why One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is used as a text for college courses in many disciplines. A partial list of topics that show up in treatments of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest includes the following

diverse items: the patterns of romance, the patterns of comedy, the patterns of tragedy, black humor, the absurd, the hero in modern dress, the comic Christ, the folk and western heroes, the fool as mentor, the Grail Knight, attitudes toward sex, abdication of masculinity, the politics of laughter, mechanistic and totemistic symbols, the comic strip, the ritualistic father-figure, and the psychopathic savior. Ronald Wallace, writing in The Last Laugh: Form and Affirmation in the Contemporary American Comic Novel, connects the novel directly to Kesey's early interest in comic books by pointing out that its main characters are drawn from ancient conventions of comedy. Wallace perceives in Nurse Ratched and McMurphy respectively the aiazon the boastful, deluded fooland the eiron the witty self- deprecator who defeats his opponent by hiding his skill and intelligence. Furthermore, Wallace sees McMurphy as a "Dionysian Lord of Misrule" who "presides over a comic fertility ritual and restores instinctual life to the patients." In aCritique review, Terry G. Sherwood notices the balance between comic strip conventions and those belonging to the serious novel, since the work's major confrontation is between the forces of good and evil.Journal of Narrative Technique reviewer Michael Boardman points out the novel's power as a classic tragedy because it portrays a character opposed by forces from within himself as well as from others. The conflict between Big Nurse and McMurphy becomes a struggle between McMurphy's need for freedom as an individual and his need to survive in a hostile environment by conforming to oppressive standards. The conventions of the Western novel with its characters, colloquialisms, and frontier values are also present in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, observes Richard Blessing in the Journal of Popular Culture. Blessing writes, "Essentially, the McMurphy who enters the ward is a frontier hero, an anachronistic paragon of rugged individualism, relentless energy, capitalistic shrewdness, virile coarseness and productive strength. He is Huck Finn with muscles, Natty Bumppo with pubic hair. He is the descendant of the pioneer who continually fled civilization and its feminizing and gentling influence." The brand of individualism and freedom presented in McMurphy's behavior approaches anarchy too closely for some critics. The mayhem he raises by throwing plates and butter at walls, shouting obscenities, breaking windows, sneaking prostitutes into the ward, and stealing boats, claims Bruce E. Wallis in Cithara, is not a foundation for lasting sanity and self-esteem beyond reproach. The best opposition to society's more repressive forces, he feels, may not, after all, be man's sexual and nonrational capacities. Other critics are alarmed by the novel's portrayal of women. Leslie Horst says in Lex et Scientia that Kesey's depiction of Nurse Ratched is demeaning; more importantly, she continues, "considerable hatred of women is justified in the logic of the novel. The plot demands that the dreadful women who break the rules men have made for them become the targets of the reader's wrath." Viewing the novel primarily from the aspect of gender, Robert Forrey's negative assessment of the novel in Modern Fiction Studies claims that "the premise of the novel is that women ensnare, emasculate, and, in some cases, crucify men." On the other hand, Wallace contends that there is no misogyny intended in Kesey's reversal of traditionally-assigned gender-appropriate roles, which he relates to all comic literature "from Aristophanes to Erica Jong." Boardman suggests that the Big Nurse is not meant to represent womankind, but to be the incarnation of evil required by the novel's dramatic action. In The Art of Grit: Ken Kesey's Fiction, M. Gilbert Porter reports Kesey's comment that any good story needs a villain that is truly recognizably evil if the writer is to fulfill his ethical purpose, that of standing "between the public and evil. . . . The good writer in [Kesey's] opinion is a person of `power' and character who guards faithfully that axis of human choice." Ronald Billingsley, in an unpublished dissertation, also maintains that Kesey's book does not define women as generally evil: "Big Nurse and her emasculating ilk are no more truly feminine than the Acutes and Dr. Spivey are truly masculine. Like machines, these women are neuter, asexual devices that respond to power. " Kesey's next book, Sometimes a Great Notion, reflects Kesey's Oregon background and the concerns of the upper Northwest region. The title refers to the folk song refrain "Sometimes it seems a great notion / to jump in the river and drown," and signals one of the book's themes, the relatively high suicide rate in the Wakonda logging town and others like it. Independent loggers Hank and Leland Stamper are at odds with their

union-dominated community and with each other. After Hank involves his Ivy-league educated half- brother's mother in a sexual relationship, Leland seeks revenge by seducing Hank's wife. The novel approaches these events from a variety of points of view to reveal what the brothers learn from each other. Like William Faulkner, a writer Kesey greatly admires, Kesey comments on the subjectivity of perception by using the cinematic device of multiple perspectives. To make the medium of fiction more fit for his purpose, he liberates himself from the chronological order used in most conventional novels. He also employs conscious authorial intrusion. Innovative use of italics, capital letters, and parentheses help him replicate in print the confusion, moral bankruptcy, and future shock that his characters face. In many ways, the conflict between the Stamper brothers corresponds to Kesey's own inner conflicts. During his college years, the conflict between his down-home athletic nature and his more artistic and intellectual side became more obvious. He could socialize with both intellectuals and more active groups, but they did not usually find each other mutually acceptable. The brothers in Sometimes a Great Notion embody these conflicting impulses. Gordon Lish asks in a Genesis West interview: "Where are you going in Great Notion? What is it you're testing?" Kesey answers: "For one thing, I want to find out which side of me really is: the woodsy, logger sidecomplete with homespun homilies and crackerbarrel corniness, a valid side of me that I likeor its opposition. The two Stamper brothers in the novel are each one of the ways I think I am." In 1963 when Kesey was finishing Sometimes a Great Notion, a developer forced the evacuation of Perry Lane, and the Keseys bought a house in La Honda where he continued as a leader of the psychedelic movement. For the next few years, he set aside the writing life as too far removed from first- hand experience, and sought an alternative with Neal Cassady and other kindred spirits in a group called The Merry Pranksters. After his curiosity about altered states of consciousness was stimulated by the experiments at the VA Hospital, Kesey continued his experimental drug use together with the group at La Honda. They devised games and a variety of audio-visual aids to enhance their sensory perceptions while under the influence of drugs. Evolving from private parties to public parties to large-scale public events, these "acid-tests" introduced light shows, psychedelic art, mixed-media presentations, and acid rock music to the growing hippie culture. Headed for the New York World's Fair and the events surrounding the publication of Sometimes a Great Notion, the Pranksters crossed the country in a 1939 International Harvester bus. Decorated with bright colors applied at random, the bus carried two placards, one on the front announcing its name "Further" and one on the back saying "Caution: Weird Load." The events of the trip are recorded in several works using a variety of media. A documentary film of the trip in progress is stored in Los Angeles, California. Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test became an underground classic and a paragon of the New Journalism, a style of nonfiction that includes the observer's responses as a participant in the events described. Though Wolfe's book contains some factual errors and distortions, Kesey says that it accurately captures the spirit and atmosphere of the Merry Prankster period. Kesey's own accounts of those days appear in Kesey's Garage Sale, Demon Box, and The Further Inquiry. Critics refer to Kesey's Garage Sale as the book in which the destructive potential of drugs catches up with the author. It contains his screenplay "Over the Border," based on his 1967 flight to Mexico to avoid prosecution for marijuana possession. After witnessing the squalor and anti-American sentiments of small Mexican towns, and after his son survived a brush with death, Kesey returned to California to serve a short sentence at the San Mateo County Jail and the San Mateo Sheriff's Honor Camp. When released, he moved to a farm in Pleasant Hill, near Eugene, Oregon. Wolfe's book preserved and extended Kesey's reputation as a drug culture guru so

that many visitors sought him out at the farm, looking for drug experiences or a place to live. Numbering in the hundreds per week during the seventies, the number of visitors has since decreased, leaving Kesey with more time for writing, teaching, farming, family, and community service. Demon Box, Kesey's 1986 collection of shorter works written in the '70s and '80s, reflects on both his pleasant and unpleasant experiences in the counterculture. "There are nostalgic memories of meeting the Beatles in London and the Nazi gestalt therapy of Dr. Woofner, the Charismatic Manipulator of the Big Sur Institute of Higher Light," yet, the image the work leaves of the '60s on Deboree's farm is "not Aquarius the truth-seeker, but the infantile Venus-ruled Taurus gunned into fertilizer because he got too big for his fences," Ronald Curran comments in aWestern American Literature review. Curran sees Kesey's elegy for Neal Cassady, "The Day After Superman Died," as an "ambivalent" tribute to the friend who died of a drug overdose and exposure in 1968. "[The narrator's] lament for his friend evolves into a chronicle of fear over [the] dark forces" beyond his understanding and control, which appear in the story as various corpses, a raven, and the animal-like copulation of Sandy and the two bums he has banished from his farm, Porter relates. The other pieces in Demon Box fictionalized autobiographical sketches, travelogues to Egypt and China, and essays, most of them previously published in underground magazinesare held together by the presence of a narrative persona, Devlin Deboree. Kesey first used this version of himself in "Over the Border," along with fictional names for his family and friends. He has employed this cast of characters consistently ever since. The name Devlin Deboree (note the alliterating consonants and the end sounds similar to Ken Kesey) suggests "devil" and "debris," which could be taken to refer to bedeviling ruins and rubble or to one who bedevils ruins and rubble (that is, one who raises the devil with the debris in American culture). Or it may be an updated version of Thomas Carlyle's Teufelsdroeckh ("devil's dirt"), who in Sartor Resartus is an earlier seeker of higher consciousness. In any case, this persona allows Kesey fictional latitude for shaping actual events into suggestive patterns of meaning. Being a guru of psychedelic experience can have its dark side, a fact apparent in several of the works collected in this book. Porter explains, "The problem years seem mainly to be those between the publication ofSometimes a Great Notion in 1964 and Kesey's move to the farm in Pleasant Hill in 1968. Troubled areas from those years come up repeatedly in the new work: the experiments with drugs and group living that sometimes exploited family and friends, the vision of altering consciousness and establishing revolution, the lure of power, the scrapes with the law, the rasping polarities of freedom and responsibility, the frustrating attempts to establish universal connections. The tone in these pieces shifts from self-indulgence to self-criticism to self- congratulation, but underlying every movement is an intense quest for understanding, for direction, for form." Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Daniel Pyne observes, "In his strong, lucid new collection of stories and essays, . . . Kesey wrestles with those 20 yearswith the contradictions that the last two decades have engenderedand with the terrifying possibility that he came away from his Great Quest empty-handed. . . . Or at least not with the kind of universal truths and solutions that [he] seemed to be seeking." Oliver Harris sums up in the New Statesman that as a final assessment of the outcome of those years, Demon Box "raises more questions than it answers." Critics are also ambivalent about the uneven quality of Kesey's style inDemon Box. "Kesey is at his best when out of Oregon on magazine assignments abroad, producing comic masterpieces of New Journalism on location in Egypt and China, or when returning to mourn the fallen idols of the Sixties," which include John Lennon and the late Cassady, Harris notes. He attributes the uneven style to Kesey's ability to master language while faithfully displaying its inherent limitations. Because Demon Box was not published until thirteen years after Kesey's Garage Sale, some critics speculates that the author's experimental drug use had adversely affected his

literary creativity. Other explanations for the hiatus include the author's previously-expressed preference for immediate sensory experience over "literary" experience (which is more reflective), and his awareness of the limits of language as a tool for expanding or heightening consciousness. The Further Inquiry, Kesey's 1990 retrospective on the Merry Prankster years, is also introspective. Structured as a mock trial, the screenplay pits a prosecutor named Chest against the testimony of the various Pranksters. Dierdre English observes in the New York Times Book Review that for the author, "the Pranksters were not pioneers but `unsettlers,' and their destination was no destination. And one not need blame LSD and marijuana for the sins of heroin and cocaine to admit that the acid revolution did leave some dead Indians behind." In this trial, Kesey "is at once confessing to the damage done and asking for equal consideration of the righteous fun the Pranksters wreaked," English explains. "Uptight America was in desperate need of what they provided: an astoundingly successful communal exorcism of the stifling spirits of the '50s' conformity. In the current cultural atmosphere, a new puritanism about sex, drugs and rebellious play, it would be liberating to quaff a hit of what the Pranksters hadtheir all-out excitement, spontaneity and spoofing. But some of their ideas of fun no longer amuse." English concludes that the group is only partly acquitted by this defense, especially when compared to other accounts of their activities such as Paul Perry's On the Bus: The Complete Guide to the Legendary Trip of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and the Birth of the Counterculture. For skirting some of the more disturbing issues and events that Perry presents in detail, English says of Kesey's Further Inquiry, "The Prankster rides again." Continuing to take experimental risks in the 1980s, Kesey wrote a children's book, Little Trickler the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear. In this story as in his other books, good conquers evil. When a little squirrel decides to stop the bullying of a local tyrant, the Ozark mountains become safe again for the animals who live there. Kesey also worked with thirteen creative writing graduate students to writeCaverns, a mystery novel. It was their responsibility to see that it was published. The plot begins in 1934 when an itinerant evangelist named Loach discovers a cave decorated with archetypical "drawings that will challenge conventional ideas about American archaeology and Western religion," Alfred Bendixen relates in the New York Times Book Review. The story follows Loach from his discovery of the cave, to the murder of a photographer and a subsequent prison term, and finally to his quest to rediscover the cave. Loach is accompanied on his quest by an archaeologist, a reporter, a priest, two mediums, and a large cast of motley characters. Bendixen adds, "The book is probably best described as a partly successful attempt to fuse the adventures of Indiana Jones with the cosmic spirit and multiple perspectives of `The Canterbury Tales.'" However, Madison Smartt Bell comments in the Voice Literary Supplement, "The result less resembles The Canterbury Tales than an uneven day at the Mingus Jazz Workshop. It's fun to isolate the solos; Kesey's seem the strongest, probably because they are the most recognizable. . . . Most scenes and characters are slightly overdrawn, giving the book a cartoon quality which is nonetheless appealingit has the same amiably sarcastic relation to the junk adventure novels of the '30s and '40s that the Indiana Jones movies have to old serials. At the same time there are some moving and revealing moments." Bendixen observes that the novel is troubled by the lack of a unified authorial voice, its large cast of mostly unsympathetic characters, and its emphasis on plot and comic misadventures, yet it succeeds in being "a revolutionary model for the teaching of creative writing" by "reminding us . . . that the novel requires an individual voice, fully realized characters and a clear sense of time and place." The novel would have been more fragmented if the students had produced chapters for it individually as originally planned. Kesey recalls in theNew York Times Book Review that a more unified voice was achieved by requiring everyone to write and discuss plot developments while together in class. It also had helped to be sent out together on a common journey toward an unknown finish so that no single writer's vision would take precedent over another's. He recalls telling the class, "One of the dumbest things you were ever taught was to write what you know. Because what you know is usually dull. Remember when you first wanted to be a writer? Eight or [ten] years old, reading about thin-lipped heroes flying over mysterious viny jungles toward untold

wonders? That's what you wanted to write about, about what you didn't know." Kesey tells David Weddle in an article on the class for Rolling Stone, "The fun in writing is like jazzwhere you're singing, where suddenly the voice is going forward and you're riding it, you're surfing on top of it. That is the art of writing. . . . It's as hard to find it as it is to teach somebody to find it." Under these guidelines the class produced an interesting novel that found a publisher in 1989 and fulfilled their mandate. Work on this project also helped break the writer's block Kesey encountered half-way through his novel Sailor Song when interrupted by the tragic death of his son Jed in 1984. Kesey finished Sailor Song in 1993, twenty years after his most recent book for adults. The novel features trademark Kesey zaniness, especially in the details surrounding the plot. It takes place a few years in the future, where most of the ecological disasters that have been predicted to happen actually do. There is global warming, nuclear pollution in the oceans, high rates of cancer, and drug addiction. The story is set in the run-down Alaskan fishing village of Kuinak, where residents as diverse as refugees, travelers and Deaps (Descendants of Early Aboriginal Peoples) try to make a comfortable home in an increasingly uncomfortable world. Ike Sallas, the hero of Kuinak, is a man with a past. He used to be a crop duster. But when his daughter died of an ecologically based illness, he took revenge on the world by dumping fertilizers on county fairs, state fairs, and other places where people congregated. After being caught, he became a middle-class hero. Years later, living in Kuinak, he still inspires admiration among the natives, and he is called once again to be a hero when a stranger comes to town. Nicholas Levertov, an albino Hollywood movie producer, stalks into this relatively untouched paradise scouting for a location to shoot his next movie. However, as he soon makes clear, he intends to change Kuinak forever by turning it into a tourist attraction. The citizenry of the village go berserk, with some residents wanting the money that goes with complying with Levertov's desires and others wanting the village to remain untouched. The novel's end features a mysterious, apocalyptic conclusion. Critical reception to the book was mixed. "Sailor Song does not make one single particle of sense," complains New York Times Book Review critic Donald E. Westlake. He adds that the book "is a long-awaited return, maybe too long," for the writer Kesey. Finally, Westlake criticizes the structure of the book and concludes that "the novel , having been incoherent from the beginning, turns apocalyptic at the end, which doesn't in any way help." Roger Rosenblatt, writing in theNew Republic, also has complaints about Kesey's long-awaited return novel. He claims that "Kesey could have been a pretty good writer-writer, but chose instead to be a culture-writer. . . . Style to the culture-writer is not writing, but a kind of animated macho typing." Rosenblatt avers that "the new novel is plotless and idealess and pointless in its overflow of parables, anecdotes and caricatures. . . . His writing screams its own insecurity." Yet critic Joe Chidley in Macleans has a different view of Sailor Song. He praises Kesey's creation of his eccentric world, saying that the author's "patient development of a world about to selfdestruct is fascinating. And he successfully weaves a moving and mature love story into the complicated tale." He believes that "with Sailor Song, Kesey proves that despite the long hiatus, he is still in full control of the narrative form," and concludes that "Sailor Song is evidence of a prodigious talent that has been absent for far too long." In a departure from the rest of his work, Kesey explores the world of the dime-novel western with his 1994 book Last Go Round, written with friend Ken Babbs. It is based on a story Kesey's father told him about the 1911 Pendleton Round Up, where an African-American bronco rider, an older Native-American, and a young boy from Tennessee battled to win the title of World Champion All Round Cowboy of the West. Kesey has used this story merely as inspiration, and created his novel out of an amalgam of facts and his own imagination. Jackson Sundown is the Native American character, who manages to retain his dignity whether he is drinking or not. Johnathan E. Lee Spain is the naive young Tennesseean and the story's narrator, and George Fletcher is the black bronco rider. Kesey throws these characters together into a variety of adventures, all for one less-than-lofty goal: to win the silver saddle. Kesey also manages to inject a 1990s race sensitivity into a novel of an earlier time.

Janet Burroway, writing in the New York Times Book Review, claims that "Kesey has produced a pulp-thin plot . . . together with an excess of episode, inflated atmosphere and wonders of prowess, just what's demanded in the formula for the original dime westerns." She believes that the novel shows great promise but hopes his future efforts will be more focused: "we cheer him back on the bronc, hoping this is not the absolute Last Go Round. But neither does this novel win the silver saddle." Dick Roraback sums up the novel in the Los Angeles Times Book Review by calling it "Entertaining. Wacky. Sometimes Sappy." Though Kesey's works are few in number, they are significant additions to American literature and that body of writing that seeks to explore and extend the limits of the human spirit. Kesey's fiction displays a distinctive blending of American traditions. As an extension of the Beat movement, it reflects the concerns and attitudes of American Transcendentalism. A number of parallels link Kesey with a tradition that found its most complete expression in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Emerson defined Transcendentalism as Idealism in 1842; Kesey's search was Idealism in the 1960s. Kesey shared with the Transcendentalists such attitudes as these: love of nature, with the expectation that nature teaches the most important truths; an eclectic approach to finding knowledge, with conventions and institutions largely ignored or resisted; an impatience with the limitations of language; a confidence in intuitive knowledge and an obsession with a transcendental experience; an attraction to the vernacular hero; a feeling that reform must begin with the self; and a predisposition toward mysticism. In addition to One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, critics regard Kesey as an accomplished writer for other achievements. His approach to cherished American traditions and values is original and engaging, and his humor grows naturally out of the situations and idioms of his characters. Kesey displays a skill for creating the revealing anecdote. He readily perceives both the rational and more complex sides of human nature, giving his characters a spiritual depth necessary to carry his themes of freedom and the moral responsibilities of creativity. His innovative fictional technique and self-criticism are notable. Furthermore, in keeping with his often-cited declaration that he would "rather live a novel than write one," his personal quests have made him an influential leader in culture as well as literature.

Source Citation: "Overview of Ken (Elton) Kesey." DISCovering Authors. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Gale Student Resources In Context. Web. 21 Nov. 2010. Document URL http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/suic/CriticalEssayDetailsPage/CriticalEssayDetailsWin dow?displayGroupName=Critical-Essay&prodId=SUIC&action=e&windowstate =normal&catId=&documentId=GALE%7CEJ2101200283&mode=view&userGrou pName=rock404&jsid=4141276a419c6c1d91af510d390c16d7 Gale Document Number: GALE|EJ2101200283