In California Kesey's friends served LSD-laced Kool-Aid to members of their parties.Īt a Veterans' Administration hospital in Menlo Park, California, Kesey was paid as a volunteer experimental subject, taking mind-altering drugs and reporting their effects. Their bus, called Furthur, was painted in Day-Glo colors. Tom Wolfe described in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) Kesey and his friends, called the Merry Pranksters, as they traveled the country and used various hallucinogens. His first work was an unpublished novel, ZOO, about the beatniks of the North Beach community in San Francisco. Kesey attended a creative writing course taught by the novelist Wallace Stegner. In 1956 he married his school sweetheart, Faye Haxby. Kesey soon dropped out, joined the counterculture movement, and began experimenting with drugs. On graduating he won a scholarship to Stanford University. He studied at the University of Oregon, where he acted in college plays. He spent his early years hunting, fishing, swimming he learned to box and wrestle, and he was a star football player.

Ken Kesey was born in La Junta, CO, and brought up in Eugene, OR. Kesey has been called the Pied Piper, who changed the beat generation into the hippie movement. In the 1960s, Kesey became a counterculture hero and a guru of psychedelic drugs with Timothy Leary. Ken Kesey was American writer, who gained world fame with his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962, filmed 1975).

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