"The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer-- they think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer." -- Ken Kesey
I have a guilty confession. I have never read anything by Ken Kesey. But I am including him in my list anyway. I have seen
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and it is a great movie. So great that it won a boatload of Oscars. Mainly, I am including him because of the joy he found in living life.
Kesey is a bridge between the Beats and the Hippie movement. Too young to be a beatnik, too old to be a hippie, Kesey was never content to write stories; he had to live them. He became friends with Neal Cassady (a beatnik) and through him met Ginsberg and Kerouac, who introduced him to Timothy Leary. Leary turned Kesey on to LSD and Kesey became a willing guinea pig for the drug; which was legal at the time. Kesey began to throw parties known as the Acid Tests which were a big part of the burgeoning Love Culture of San Fransisco. A little band named The Warlocks provided the entertainment, who later became known as The Grateful Dead. The Acid Tests were chronicled in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Hunter S. Thompson's book about the Hell's Angels.
Kesey's break out hit that earned him fame and fortune was a book called One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, While writing the book Kesey worked in a mental hospital. During the night shift he took hallucinogenic drugs and wrote. He thought that the patients there were not actually ill, but just behaved in a way that society couldn't accept. It became the premise of his book. The book was later turned into a movie that Kesey claimed he never saw. He was upset that Jack Nicholson was cast as the leading role, and also that the movie wasn't narrated by the "Big Indian" as the book was.
Kesey later was known for his band of "Merry Pranksters", a group that traveled cross-country in a bus named "Further." In a side note, this is how I first discovered Kesey. While in high school I traveled to a town in western New York called Darien Lake for a Phish show (my first ever). I didn't have a ticket and never made it into the show, but heard from the parking lot the introduction of Kesey during the show as "Ken Uncle Sam Bozo Easy Kesey". He and the Pranksters performed a "Bozo" dance, and the lead singer of Phish announced, "this is what happens when you do too much acid 30 years later." It was a helluva show and turned me on to Kesey and Phish.
Add Ken Kesey to the list of authors whose books I need to read.