Ken Kesey's Cuckoo's Nest

About Cuckoo's Nest

Ken Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) while working as a psychiatric ward aide and participating in CIA-funded psychedelic experiments at Stanford — the novel's portrait of a mid-century Oregon ward under Nurse Ratched's control draws on both experiences. Narrated by Chief Bromden, the Native American patient who everyone believes is deaf and dumb, it follows the arrival of Randle McMurphy, the con man who chose the hospital over jail and who attempts to liberate the patients from institutional submission. Kesey's second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), follows an Oregon logging family and is widely considered his technical masterwork. Kesey himself became the subject of Tom Wolfe's New Journalism classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968).