Ken Kesey

Author Ken Kesey was recovering in a hospital Sunday from a mild stroke suffered last week. Kesey, 62, awoke from an afternoon nap Thursday at his home in Pleasant Hill and found that he was unable to use his right arm, said Ed Jolley, his stepfather. The author of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was admitted to Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene, where he has since regained some use of his arm, Jolley said.

Without Sterling Lord, there would be no Jack Kerouac - not Kerouac as we know him, anyway, the writer who introduced the Beat Generation. Lord was a former magazine editor and fledgling literary agent working in a basement apartment in New York when Kerouac walked in, handsome and scruffy, "On the Road" manuscript stuffed in his backpack. It took Lord four years and canny magazine placements to land Kerouac a book deal, but he persevered, even ignoring Kerouac's pleas to give up. "When I read the manuscript, I knew this was a very interesting voice and very interesting writer, and he should be heard," Lord says from his home in Manhattan.

Laid to rest in a coffin painted in psychedelic swirls of purple, yellow and orange, novelist Ken Kesey took center stage Wednesday for one last time in a theater where he did magic tricks in his youth. Eulogized as a teacher, trickster, writer and seeker of truth, the author of the novels "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Sometimes a Great Notion" died Saturday at age 66 from complications following surgery to remove a cancerous tumor on his liver.

"Cuckoo's Nest. " Sure, everyone's heard of it. But is it worth reading? Before Jack Nicholson won his first Oscar, before there was a bus full of merry pranksters, there was a writing student with a swing-shift job in a mental ward. It's the Ken Kesey of that era who stares from the jacket flap of the 50th anniversary edition of his debut novel, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest": His curly hair is cropped short, he wears a cotton work shirt and his gaze is steady. To someone of my generation - X-ish - he's almost unrecognizable.

Novelist Ken Kesey, the LSD-dropping Merry Prankster who wrote the 1960s novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," lay in critical condition Friday after a cancerous tumor was removed from his liver. Kesey, 66, was operated on two weeks ago at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene, said his friend Ken Babbs. He said doctors had removed 40% of Kesey's liver, and there were no signs of cancer elsewhere in his body.

He is famous for being famous. He is not taken seriously. He has become a footnote to an era that much of American society wants to forget ever happened. He has failed at the literary game where success is a shelf of books produced at regular intervals, that thing called a body of work.

Kesey. Ken Kesey. Oh yeah. That prankster guy. That balding hippie relic from the '60s, mercurial main character of Tom Wolfe's manic socio-psychedelic epic, "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."

Eighteen years ago, I was Ken Kesey's interpreter/guide on an expedition to the Great Pyramid. When we weren't poking around for mysteries in the Egyptian sands, I was hoping he'd tell stories about his Acid Test days in 1965 and 1966. Kesey, though, wanted to discuss Proust and Hemingway and Turgenev. Big surprise. Of all the people who talked about the Death of the Novel in the '60s, he had seemed most in earnest.

Before Ken Kesey wrote "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" or stocked a psychedelic school bus with LSD and the Merry Pranksters to look for America, he was a wrestler. He might never have written "Cuckoo's Nest," the 1962 novel that launched him to literary stardom, if he hadn't dislocated his shoulder wrestling for the University of Oregon. The injury kept him out of the military draft, allowing him to go to Wallace Stegner's writing seminar at Stanford University, where his job at the local veterans hospital gave him the setting for "Cuckoo's Nest" and the prototype for mean Nurse Ratched.

In late 1965, I went to the Trips Festival at the Longshoreman's Hall in San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf: three nights of celebrating the music, art and energy of the burgeoning counterculture. The festival was run by Ken Kesey, who had hired his new friends, the Hells Angels, to handle security. Inside the hall, professional dance groups threaded their way throughout the floor, interacting with the public.

Novelist Ken Kesey, who penned "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," and his compatriots the Merry Band of Pranksters didn't have a clue how to operate a 16-millimeter movie camera or a Nagra audio recorder. But that didn't stop them from trying to make a movie out of their fabled 1964 LSD-fueled cross-country road trip from La Honda, Calif., to the New York World's Fair, which Tom Wolfe famously wrote about in his book "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. " Kesey, his Pranksters and Beat Generation figure Neal Cassady captured some 40 hours of filmed footage and sound recording during their venture on a fluorescent-painted school bus they called "Further.

The documentary "Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place" seems intended as a pleasant nostalgia tour that cycles through some of the hoariest conventional wisdom about the 1960s. Directed by Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood, the film is constructed in part from recently restored color film footage and out-of-synch audio initially created during a 1964 cross-country bus trip undertaken by author Ken Kesey, flush from the success of his "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," as he made his way from California to New York around the time of the publication of his second novel "Sometimes a Great Notion.

Nearly everyone familiar with the history of the 1960s has heard of Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey , the pranksters who spread the gospel of psychedelics to the countercultural generation. But far fewer remember Owsley Stanley. Stanley, who died Saturday at age 76, was arguably as pivotal as Leary and Kesey for altering minds in the turbulent '60s. Among a legion of youthful seekers, his name was synonymous with the ultimate high as a copious producer of what Rolling Stone once called "the best LSD in the world ?

Before Ken Kesey wrote "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" or stocked a psychedelic school bus with LSD and the Merry Pranksters to look for America, he was a wrestler. He might never have written "Cuckoo's Nest," the 1962 novel that launched him to literary stardom, if he hadn't dislocated his shoulder wrestling for the University of Oregon. The injury kept him out of the military draft, allowing him to go to Wallace Stegner's writing seminar at Stanford University, where his job at the local veterans hospital gave him the setting for "Cuckoo's Nest" and the prototype for mean Nurse Ratched.

Dreams of getting author Ken Kesey's original psychedelic bus back on the road again have hit a pothole. The Kesey family is looking for a new sponsor to finance restoration work and a TV documentary after breaking things off with Hollywood restaurant owner David Houston, who had hoped to raise $100,000 to restore the bus made famous in Tom Wolfe's 1968 book, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."

Zane Kesey picks at clumps of moss and swirls of brightly colored paint and patches of rust covering the school bus that his father, the late author Ken Kesey, rode cross-country with a refrigerator stocked with LSD-laced drinks in pursuit of a new art form. "This comes off pretty easy," Kesey says, a smile playing over his face. "It's amazing, some of the things that are coming out -- things I remember." He continues tidying the keepsake. "It's going to take a lot of bubble gum," he says.

The documentary "Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place" seems intended as a pleasant nostalgia tour that cycles through some of the hoariest conventional wisdom about the 1960s. Directed by Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood, the film is constructed in part from recently restored color film footage and out-of-synch audio initially created during a 1964 cross-country bus trip undertaken by author Ken Kesey, flush from the success of his "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," as he made his way from California to New York around the time of the publication of his second novel "Sometimes a Great Notion.

Zane Kesey picks at clumps of moss and swirls of brightly colored paint and patches of rust covering the school bus that his father, the late author Ken Kesey, rode cross-country with a refrigerator stocked with LSD-laced drinks in pursuit of a new art form. "This comes off pretty easy," Kesey says, a smile playing over his face. "It's amazing, some of the things that are coming out -- things I remember." He continues tidying the keepsake. "It's going to take a lot of bubble gum," he says.

When Ken Kesey was kicked loose after spending the 1967 Summer of Love in jail for a marijuana bust, the guards asked the famous author, psychedelic explorer and prankster if he was going to write a book and include them in it. "I think so," Kesey replied. Two years after the author's death, "Kesey's Jail Journal" is out.

The Willamette Valley was still blanketed in a misty predawn darkness when the horrendous news hit an Oregon dairy farmer named Ken Kesey, author of such enduring fictional classics as "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Sometimes a Great Notion": Suicidal terrorists had attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing more than 4,300 people.