Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest | 1962 |
| Sometimes a Great Notion | 1964 |
| Caverns (As: O.U. Levon, With: University of Oregon Writing Class) | 1989 |
| Sailor Song | 1992 |
| Last Go Round (With: Ken Babbs) | 1994 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| Kesey’s Garage Sale | 1973 |
| Demon Box | 1986 |
Publication Order of Children’s Books
| Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear | 1990 |
| The Sea Lion | 1991 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| Kesey’s Jail Journal | 2003 |
About Ken Kesey
Ken Kesey (1935 to 2001) was an American novelist and a central figure of the 1960s counterculture, best known for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1962) and “Sometimes a Great Notion” (1964). He saw himself as a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s, and led the group of friends known as the Merry Pranksters.
Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado, to dairy farmers and grew up in Springfield, Oregon. A champion wrestler at school and college, he graduated from the University of Oregon in 1957 and then studied creative writing at Stanford University, where his friends included Larry McMurtry, Wendell Berry and Robert Stone. While at Stanford he volunteered for drug trials at the Menlo Park Veterans’ Hospital, a study later revealed to have been financed by the CIA, and worked there as a night aide.
That hospital work fed into “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, narrated by Chief Bromden. The novel was an immediate success. Dale Wasserman adapted it for the stage in 1963, and Milos Forman’s 1975 film with Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher won the five main Academy Awards. “Sometimes a Great Notion”, about an Oregon logging family, was the book Kesey regarded as his best work. Paul Newman directed and starred in the 1970 film version.
In 1964 Kesey and the Merry Pranksters crossed the United States in a school bus nicknamed Furthur, a journey described in Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”. The parties that followed, the Acid Tests, had the Grateful Dead as house band. After an arrest for marijuana possession in 1965 he fled to Mexico, later served a jail sentence, and then settled on the family farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon.
His later books were fewer. “Kesey’s Garage Sale” (1973) and “Demon Box” (1986) collect essays and stories. “Caverns” was written with his graduate writing class at the University of Oregon under the name O.U. Levon. “Sailor Song” (1992), set in a small Alaskan town, was his only solo novel after 1964, and “Last Go Round” (1994), written with Ken Babbs, is a Western about the 1911 Pendleton Round-Up. He died in Eugene, Oregon, in November 2001, and “Kesey’s Jail Journal” appeared in 2003.
Photo: Associated Students of the California Institute of Technology (The Big T, 1974), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).