Novelist Ken Kesey, who wrote "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," then became a prophet of the psychedelic era when he led an LSD-fueled band of free spirits on a cross-country bus trip in the early 1960s, died Saturday at a hospital in Eugene, Ore. He was 66.
His death came two weeks after cancer surgery to remove nearly half of his liver.
FOR THE RECORD
Los Angeles Times Thursday November 15, 2001 Home Edition Part A Part A Page 2 A2 Desk 2 inches; 53 words Type of Material: Correction
Kesey obituary--The obituary on novelist Ken Kesey that appeared in Sunday's Section A misspelled the name of the bus used by his Merry Pranksters, the free-spirited group that helped spark the psychedelic 1960s. The bus was called Furthur. The story also should have noted that Kesey's son, Jed, died in a van crash in 1984. It erroneously said that he died in 1990 in a car crash.
Kesey found resounding critical acclaim with "Cuckoo's Nest," a darkly humorous parable set in a mental hospital. Published in 1962, his first novel resonated with a generation weary of the conformist 1950s and receptive to its message about the dangers to individual freedom and expression.
He also was the leader of the Merry Pranksters, who commanded a 1939 school bus painted in Day-Glo hues to spread their love of hallucinogens and a let-it-be attitude. Their exploits were celebrated in Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," which became an underground classic soon after its 1968 publication. Kesey emerged as a countercultural folk hero.
"He was very definitely the person who set the tone of the entire psychedelic or hippie movement," Wolfe said Saturday by phone from Philadelphia. "Ken had this expression: 'It's time to move off dead center.' . . . A whole generation moved off dead center, a whole lot of things changed, from the breakdown in the walls of formality between teachers and students to the use of hallucinogenic drugs."
Together with Timothy Leary, another guru of the '60s, Kesey was a major figure in "a general throwing aside of constraints, which made a tremendous difference in American society," Wolfe said.
Kesey's second and most successful novel, "Sometimes a Great Notion," followed closely behind "Cuckoo's Nest," in 1964. Over the next three decades, he would write only one more major novel, "Sailor Song," in 1992.
He seemed to relish confounding conventional expectations, abandoning writing for long stretches while he pursued other interests--performing with the Grateful Dead, giving readings of his children's stories, making videos out of the miles of footage he and other Pranksters shot during what they came to call the Intrepid Trip.
"He was a very kinetic individual," said novelist Larry McMurtry, who studied writing with Kesey at Stanford University in the late 1950s. "It is as a writer that I think of Ken. [But] he had something of the farmer in him, something of the director in him. And the Pranksters on the bus putting on hats and brightening up the lives of people in many communities--it seemed to please him."
