Ken Kesey

In 1959 he volunteered for drug experiments at a hospital in Menlo Park, California, where he worked in the psychiatric ward. That served as his inspiration for "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". He was not, as many have come to believe, a patient in the ward when he volunteered for those experiments. He worked there as an attendant.

Children: Shannon (b. 1960), Zane (b. 1961), Jed (b. 1964, d. 1984), and Sunshine (b. 1967)

Kesey burst into the literary scene with the "Cuckoo's Nest" in 1962 which he wrote from his experiences working at a veterans hospital. During this period, he volunteered for the testing on the drug LSD. After writing his second novel, "Sometimes A Great Notion," he bought an old school bus dubbed "Further. " With Neal Cassidy at the wheel and pitchers of LSD-laced-Kool-Laid in the cooler, Kesey and a band of friends who called themselves The Merry Pranksters took a trip across America to New York's World Fair.

In 1967 he fathered a daughter, Sunshine, with a woman who called herself "Mountain Girl", who in the 1980s married musician Jerry Garcia.

The bus ride was immortalized in Tom Wolfe's 1968 account, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

The stage adaptation of his novel, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," was awarded the 1973 Joseph Jefferson Award for Best Play Production at the Arlington Park Theatre in Chicago, Illinois.

" The movie version of the "Cuckoo's Nest" swept the 1974 Academy Awards for best actor, best actress, best director, and best picture. But Kesey, who has never seen the film, sued the producers because it took the viewpoint away from the character of the schizophrenic American Indian, Cheif Bromden.

Never saw (nor wanted to see) the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), based on his novel, because he had "other people in mind".

His son Jed, killed in a 1984 van wreck on a road trip with the University of Oregon wrestling team, was buried in the back yard.

It would be 28 years until Kesey published his third major novel, "Sailor Song," in 1992, and he later said he lost interest in the novel as an art form after he discovered the magic of the bus.

Hospitalized after suffering a stroke. [September 1997]

The motion picture Gerry (2002) directed by Gus Van Sant is dedicated to his memory.