Ken Elton Kesey was born on September 17, 1935 in La Junta, Colorado. Growing up, Kesey was involved in wrestling and football. He received a bachelor's degree from the University of Oregon in 1957 and married his high school sweetheart, Norma Faye Haxby, in 1956. He had three children and a daughter in 1966 with Carolyn Adams. He later won a scholarship to Stanford University's creative writing program to become an author. In 1960, he worked as an attendant in the psychiatric ward of a hospital and volunteered at the Veterans Administration hospital as a paid experimental subject in a study conducted by the U.S. Army in which he was given psychotropic medications and asked to report on their effects. . Time passes and at 40 and 50 years old, he pursues his passion and writes. In 1984, Kesey's son Jed died following a car accident. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay However, Kesey continued to perform on stage and he often appeared on stage at Grateful Dead concerts. At the age of 66, Kesey died in Eugene, Oregon, on November 10, 2001, due to complications following surgery for liver cancer. After many experiments with these drugs, Kesey began to believe that these drugs had great potential. After writing a few books, he believed that the key to "individual liberation" lay in psychedelic drugs, and he often wrote under the influence of them. While everyone was focused on the space race, Kesey saw psychoactives as "tools to explore within, learn more about ourselves and others, and find new ways of seeing the world already around us. During the experiments, Kesey even tried ingesting the drugs in order to gain insight into other perceptions of the world. Kesey became so “addicted” to this experience that he even convinced his friends to try electroshock therapy in order to gain clarity in their experiences. his novel. LSD experimentation and associated parties, also known as "Acid Tests", grew in popularity. However, in 1965, Ken was arrested for marijuana possession and after faking a suicide and fleeing to Mexico, he returned to face the charges. This experience also introduced Kesey to several individuals for the characters in his book One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which examined the abuses of the system against the individual. The book projects Kesey's interest in altered consciousness. He also used his experiences working at the hospital as inspiration for his book, which was an immediate success upon its publication in 1962. In my honest opinion, I think Kesey is absolutely crazy. I don't understand his point of view and I don't like that he wrote his books under the influence of drugs. Keep in mind: this is just a sample. Get a personalized article from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay This shows that Kesey was not in the right frame of mind and did not “really” write the book. Yes, he's the author, but mentally I don't think Ken Elton Kesey wrote it. I believe you should have the “right” mind and mentality when writing a book. However, I haven't read the book yet, so I guess I judge a book by its cover..