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Ken Kesey , and as a cultural icon whom some consider a link between the "beat generation" of the 1950s and the "hippies" of the 1960s.

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Ken Kesey was born in LaJunta, Colorado and spent much of his youth in the Pacific Northwest. At a young age his family moved from Colorado to Springfield, Oregon. He eloped with his high-school sweetheart, Faye Haxby, before he went to college. They had three children, Jed, Zane, and Shannon. Kesey attended the University of Oregon's School of Journalism, where he received a degree in speech and communication in 1957. He was also an Olympic-caliber wrestler, and was awarded a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship in 1958 to enroll in the creative writing program at Stanford University, which he did the following year.

At Stanford University in 1959, Kesey volunteered to take part in a study at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital on the effects of psychoactive drugs. These included LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, andor IT-290 (AMT). Kesey wrote many detailed accounts of his experiences with these drugs, both during the study and in years of private experimentation which followed. His role as a medical guinea pig inspired Kesey to write in 1962. The success of this book caused him to move to La Honda, California, in the mountains outside of San Francisco. He frequently entertained friends with parties he called "Acid Tests" involving music (such as Kesey's favorite band, The Warlocks, later known as the Grateful Dead), black lights, fluorescent paint, strobes, and other "psychedelic" effects, and of course LSD (often slipped surreptitiously into a punch). These parties were noted in some of Allen Ginsberg's poems and also worked as the basis of Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."

came from his work at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital on the night shift. Here, Kesey often spent much time talking to the patients, sometimes under the influence of the hallucinogenic drugs that he volunteered to experiment with. Kesey believed that these patients were not insane, but that society had pushed them out because they did not fit the conventional ideas of how people were supposed to act and behave. The novel was an immediate success. It was later adapted into a successful stage play by Dale Wasserman, while Milos Forman directed a screen adaptation in 1975. The screen adaptation starred Jack Nicholson and won 5 Academy Awards: Academy Award for Best Picture, Academy Award for Best Actor (Nicholson), Academy Award for Best Actress (Louise Fletcher), Academy Award for Best Director (Forman), Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay (Lawrence Hauben, Bo Goldman). Kesey claimed to have never seen the movie because of a dispute over the $20,000 he was initially paid for the film rights and he loathed the fact that the film was not narrated, as it was in the book, by the character Chief Bromden.

in 1964 required his presence in New York, Kesey, Cassady, and others in a group of friends they called the "Merry Pranksters" took a cross-country trip in a school bus nicknamed ' (and later in Kesey's own screenplay "The Furthur Inquiry") was the group's attempt at making art out of everyday life. In New York, Cassady introduced Kesey to Kerouac and to Allen Ginsberg, who in turn introduced them to Timothy Leary.

Kesey was eventually arrested for possessing marijuana, and fled to Mexico in , an intentionally feeble attempt at disguise. When the bus later returned to the United States, Kesey was arrested and sent to jail. When he was released, he moved with his family back to the family farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon in the Willamette Valley, where he was to spend the rest of his life. He wrote many articles, smaller books (mostly collections of his articles), and short stories during that time. In 1997, Kesey reunited with the Merry Pranksters at a Phish concert during a performance of the song "Colonel Forbin's Ascent." It was one of his last public appearances. Kesey died on November 10, 2001.