IT IS POSSIBLE THAT ONE OF THE GREAT AMERICAN literary works of the last forty years wasn't a novel after all- not in any conventional sense, anyway. Instead, this particular great story - which is to say, a captivating tale that enriches our understanding of not just our nation but also our nation of ideas - may have been one writer's life, as much as his books. Make no mistake: Ken Kesey - who died on November 10th, 2001, at age sixty-six, following complications from surgery for liver cancer - was indeed a great American novelist. His first celebrated book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, proved as imaginative as it did indelible, and it anticipated a great change in both a nation's and a generation's outlook. But Kesey was something beyond an author: He was a gentle but considerable cultural force, and he helped transform modern history as much through how he lived his life as through the words that he wrote, Indeed, following his death, some obituaries seemed to present Kesey as a man who had forsworn his considerable literary talents in exchange for his mid-1960s drug-obsessed exploits with the Merry Pranksters (a loose crew of friends and like-minded explorers) and the Grateful Dead (his key partners in a notorious series of West Coast event-concerts known as the Acid Tests). In other words, Kesey could have grabbed the golden ring in American letters, but he made a different choice: He decided to challenge America's psychic landscape in ways that not only risked his own reputation but also seemed to jeopardize our own social sanity.

The interesting part is, Kesey realized all along that he was imperiling his own standing, and that delighted him as much as it perplexed him. In a letter in the late t96os to novelist Larry McMurtry during a brief fugitive flight to Mexico to avoid going to prison on drug charges, Kesey wrote, "What was it that had brought a man so high of promise to so low a state in so short a time? Well, the answer can be found in just one short word, my friends, in just one all-well-used syllable: "Dope!" And while it may be claimed by some of the addled advocates of these chemicals that our hero is known to have indulged in drugs before his literary success, we must point out that there was evidence of his literary prowess well before the advent of the so-called psychedelic into his life but no evidence at all of any of the lunatic thinking that we find thereafter!" That letter appears in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test - a rollicking, meticulous and thoughtful documentation of Kesey's adventures. Wolfe had the good sense to recognize that Kesey was living a terrific novel in that time, not writing one. Kesey, though, is the one who had the sense (good, bad or neither) to live the risks of his tale.

KESEY WAS RAISED AS WHAT MIGHT BE called an all-American boy. He was born in La Junta, Colorado, to dairy farmers Fred and Geneva Kesey, on September x7th,. I935. The family later moved to Springfield, Oregon. Fred Kesey - who founded one of Oregon's largest dairy cooperatives - was a man who imbued in his sons a love of outdoorlife(shooting, running the rapids of the Willamette River) and a passion for sports; Kesey was an outstanding runner and a. star football player and wrestler in high school. Fred also taugh~ Kesey to be ambitious, independent, tough and fearless. Consequently, he grew up confident, and as something of a natural leader. His Springfield High graduating class voted him Most Likely to Succeed, and at the University of Oregon he was popular in fraternities and enjoyed success as a wrestler and actor. Kesey later spent time in Los Angeles, thinking about becoming an actor, but mainly he wanted to.write.

These observations - fused with his ongoing drug experiences - inspired him to set aside the novel he was working on and produce a whole new one. He wrote parts of it under the influence of psychedelics, and then, when the drugs had worn off, he would go back .through his pages, keeping the passages that conveyed distorted mental states and rewriting the parts that the drugs had made excessive. The result was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. One of the most legendary and influential novels of the last half-century, Cuckoo's Nest was the story of

Randle Patrick McMurphy, a defiant man in a madhouse where madness was the only affirming and clarifying response to the dehumanizing tyranny of an authority figure like Nurse Ratched. The book told its story from the vantage of a schizophrenic friend of McMurphy's, Chief Broom. It was published in February 1962 and was an instant commercial and critical success. Jack Kerouac called Kesey "a great new American novelist," and it seemed as if Kerouac was passing to the younger writer the torch of iconoclasm in American fiction. Writing about the book in her New Y0rker review of the film, Pauline Kael observed that "the novel preceded the university turmoil, Vietnam, drugs, the counterculture. Yet it contained the prophetic essence of that whole period of revolutionary politics going psychedelic. Much of what it said has entered the consciousness of many -possibly most - Americans."

'The bus and its Pranksters arrived in New York just as reviews for Sometimes A Great Notion began to appear. The critics; were of mixed opinion, but Kesey was growing less interested in what the novel form offered him. He started talking about writing as being oldfangled and limited. Years later, he told ROLLING STONE that he had found the paradigm for this new view in Neal Cassady. "I saw that Cassady does everything a novel does, except he did it better 'cause he was livin' it and not writin' about it."

Near the end of their stay on the East Kesey and the Pranksters visited Millbrook, an experimental, drug- community in upstate New York. Millbrook was headed by a pair of ex-Harvard professors, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (the latter known later as Baba Ram Dass), two men who had earned unwanted notoriety for conducting drug experiments with college students and losing their tenure as a result. Leary was one of the most influential psychologists in America and had long been studying the therapeutic use of psychedelics. Kesey and the Pranksters saw Leafy, Alpert and the others at Millbrook as sympathetic comrades, but when Furthur pulled into the grounds at the stately Millbrook mansion with the Pranksters setting off green smoke bombs, they received a chilly welcome. In part this was because the two groups differed strongly in their opinions on how psychedelics should be administered. It's true that Leary believed that therapists should not administer drugs I, a patient and then sit by and note his actions but should, in fact, engage in the drug state along with the subject. But I e also strongly favored implementation of an environmental condition that became known as "set and setting": If you prepared the drug taker with the proper mind-set and provided reassuring surroundings, then you increased the likelihood that the person might , have a significant opportunity for a healthy psychological reorganization. Kesey, by contrast, believed in a Wild West: approach: Let people take the drugs in any variety of social or public settings and just see what happens. In . horror, Leary and Alpert's Millbrook assembly saw the Pranksters as dangerous.

[some text is missing here]

Back in La Honda, the word of Kesey and company's drug intake and communal lifestyle was now an open secret. Citizens became alarmed about what was down the road from them, and local law enforcement put Kesey's house under surveillance -all to the amusement of the Pranksters. On an April night in 1965, police raided Kesey's home. He busted one officer in the face and was arrested for resisting arrest. He was also arraigned on possession of marijuana - a charge that could yield serious prison time. None of this impeded Kesey or the Pranksters. He was released on bail and a few months later rewarded the citizens of La Honda by inviting the Hell's Angels to a three-day beer-and-acid getting-to-know-each-other affair at his home. The police kept a close watch, but there was no trouble. The Angels admired Kesey's self-determination and audacity, and Kesey admired the Angels' acceptance of their outlaw status (a romantic view that would have serious repercussions later when the Angels wreaked havoc at the Rolling Stones' tragic Altamont concert, in late 1969).

In the fall of 1965, an organization called the Vietnam Day Committee staged a huge anti-war rally at the University of California in Berkeley and invited Kesey and the Pranksters to participate - but their involvement didn't turn out as expected. When Kesey took his turn at the microphone, he lampooned the other speakers and rebuked the crowd for their own warlike belligerence. "Holding rallies and having marches," he said, between blowing blasts of "Home on the Range" on his harmonica, "you're playing their game .... There's only one thing to do. ... And that's everybody just look at it look at the war, and turn your back and say... 'luck it.' "The committee was outraged. "Who the hell invited this bastard?" somebody yelled. Paul Krassner, the editor of The Realist and one of the organizers of the event, first met Kesey that day and became a lifelong friend. He recalls, "Kesey was in this unusual position, for him, of bringing people down. I said I disagreed with his position because I was an anti-war activist, but I really admired his willingness to be politically incorrect, especially in front of this audience, which was gung-ho to march. And so at a benefit the next night, I played the harmonica and parodied his position, and he was in the audience and he jumped up onto the stage with a twinkle in his eyes, and he just said, 'I protest.' He was a political animal, but he was not doctrinaire. His dope activism was extremely political."

Kesey was about to become even more of an activist in that regard. In considering the potential effects of the use of psychedelics, he said, "When got something like we've got, ust sit on it... and possess it, you've got to move off it and give it to other people." Kesey and the Pranksters - whose group now included Carolyn Adams (also known as Mountain Girl, who later became Jerry Garcia's first wife) - began to think of a way to make this experience more public, more accessible. They conceived a series of parties, to be known as the Acid Tests, and they distributed leaflets around the Bay Area that bore the question: "Can you pass the Acid Test?" The idea was to see what would happen when people took LSD in a setting where there were no regulations or predetermined situations. At Kesey's invitation, a local musical group, the Grateful Dead, became the house band for these collective drug experiments. The Dead would play for hours as the Pranksters filmed the goings-on - everything from freakouts to religious revelations to group sex. The Acid Tests were meant to be acts of cultural, spiritual and psychic revolt, and their importance to much of what would follow - the development of hippie community and ethos, the. growth and importance of the Grateful Dead and Kesey's own fate - can be overestimated. During those hours, Jerry Garcia later said, the Dead's music "had a real sense of proportion to the event" - which is to say that sometimes the group's playing would seem to overshadow the event, and at other times it would function as backdrop to the event.

The Acid Tests ran in direct contrast to the philosophy of set and setting that Timothy Leary, Richard A1pert and others had devised for the psychedelic experience. Some people called the experience a "mind luck," and for fair reason: More than a few participants underwent difficult, even frightening experiences at the Tests, and they weren't always treated with sympathy or concern. Kesey and the Pranksters saw these risks as acceptable - as part of what people necessarily had to discover in themselves and others in this new mental and social terrain. Consequently, there was intense backlash against the Acid Tests, within both the pro-psychedelic and anti-drug movements. Up until this point, psychedelics had remained legal, but all this new publicity forced the California state legislature's hand, and the state soon made the substances illegal.

In January 1966, Kesey was sentenced to three years probation for his prior legal trouble, but he was almost immediately arrested again on new marijuana charges. A second violation brought the possibility of a longer sentence. Combined with his probation, which now might be revoked, he was facing eight years of prison time. He decided he had only one choice: to become a fugitive. "If society wants me to be an outlaw," he said, "then I'll be an outlaw, and a damned good one." With the help of Adams and others, he wrote an elaborate note and staged a fake suicide - but he had not kept his ruse private enough. Before the note was even found, everybody - friends, the FBI and the press -seemed to know where Kesey was: He had gone to Puerto Vailaria, Mexico, where a few Pranksters would occasionally visit and find him to be living a nervous life, taking off on a fast run every time somebody gave him a suspicious look. Once, Mexican federales stopped Kesey in a car and were about to detain him when he bolted, hopped a train and ended up in Guadalajara. He shortly tired of the fugitive life. He felt he owed the Pranksters and his family more fidelity, and he sneaked back into the Bay Area, where he turned up at various events and gave clandestine interviews. "I intend to stay in this country as a fugitive, and as salt in J. Edgar Hoover's wounds," he told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Meanwhile, the Acid Tests had continued - some in California and Oregon, under Ken Babbs' direction, and some in Mexico, with Kesey. By the time he returned to the Bay Area, a full-blown hippie community was thriving in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. Psychedelics were rampant in the city, and various concert promoters -

including Bill Graham and Chet Helms - were staging weekend "Trips Festivals" of their own, featuring the Grateful Dead and other psychedelic bands. In essence, Kesey and the Pranksters' social model had now become the norm for a new population. As Tom Wolfe wrote in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test: "All of a sudden it was like the Acid Tests had taken root and sprung up into people living the Tests like a whole lifestyle." But the re-suits were in many ways problematic: More and more young people were being arrested on serious charges, more and more were showing up homeless and hungry in the city, 'and more were proving vulnerable to unpleasant versions of the psychedelic experience. Kesey began to take a new view of how things were developing. "I'm going to tell everyone to start doing it without the drugs," he announced. This turn-about upset many people in the Haight: They thought Kesey was in danger of selling out their scene.

On October 2oth, 1966, Kesey was pulled over on the Bayshore Freeway, south of San Francisco, by FBI agents. He vaulted down an embankment, but the agents caught him. Now he faced a total of three major charges, including unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. Since he had already made known his new feelings about abusing psychedelics - "Once you've been through that door, you can't just keep going through it over and over again," he said - his lawyers turned his change of heart into a defense strategy: Kesey, they told the court, would now work his influence to discourage drug experimentation. In the end, some charges were dropped, two trials ended in hung juries, and Kesey pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and received a ninety-day jail sentence and a six-month sentence on a work farm, to run concurrently. In the Haight, nobody seemed to know whether Kesey had become a turncoat or had run a swindle on the law. The confusion only deepened when Kesey and the Pranksters staged an Acid Graduation Ceremony. "It's time to move on to the next step in the psychedelic revolution," Kesey said. "I know we've reached a certain point, but we're not moving anymore, we're not creating anymore, and that's why we've got to move on to the next step .... "

Kesey located his family back in his hometown of Springfield, Oregon. After serving his sentences, he joined them, and various Pranksters paid regular visits over the years. Kesey lived in Springfield for the rest of his life. As the years went along, he kept his hand in cultural matters. He became one of the major forces - along with Stewart Brand and Paul Krassner - behind The Whole Earth Catalog, and he wrote journalism on a regular basis for many publications, including ROLLING STONE, to which he was a longtime contributor). He also wrote more fiction - Sailor Song (i992, set in Alaska) and Last Go Round: A Dime Western (a x994 book about an Oregon rodeo, written with Ken Babbs, in the form of a pulp tale) - but the critical consensus was that Kesey had perhaps blown out his literary gifts. In x99o, he admitted to the Los Angeles Times that his drug use might have hampered his fiction. "But," he said, "if I could go back and trade in certain experiences I've had for brain cells presumably burned up, it would be a rough decision."

Mainly, Kesey stuck to his conviction that the greatest art form was a life well lived and to the principle that it was probably a better bet to confound fans' expectations than to feel obliged to meet them. He contributed to the Oregon community where he lived, teaching writing and Coaching wrestling. He also developed his own peculiar brand of libertarian politics, which sometimes placed him in seeming conflict with feminist and gay concerns, though that's not how he saw it. "Kesey told me that he was inadvertently influenced by the feminist movement when he wrote Sometimes a Great Notion," says Krassner. "He said, 'Women's lib has made us aware of our debauching of Mother Earth. The man who can peel off the Kentucky topsoil, gouge the land empty to get his money nuts off, then splits the conquest, leaving the ravaged land behind to raise his bastards on welfare is different from Hugh Hefner only in that he drives his cock on diesel fuel."

In 1984, Kesey's son was killed in a bus crash on the way to a wrestling tournament. Kesey was badly shaken for a long time by the event, friends of ~ his have said, and the loss may have

figured into why his highly anticipated return novel, Sailor Song, seemed to suffer. But Kesey used the tragedy as incentive to campaign for seat belts in Oregon's school buses. "Family was essential to his life," says Krassner. "His own family and his extended family.

"I thought of him as a true patriot," Krassner continues, "putting all the principles of freedom of assembly into true action. He had this American flag kerchief, and he had other clothing with stars and stripes that he wore. Kesey's patriotism was intertwined with what he did - the bus trip and the ability to do these things in this country that he didn't think he could do anywhere else. He was very basically American. He had the original values of the founders, and his writing and his actions reflected that."

Ken Kesey's legacy will likely be a mixed one, though also a major one. He authored a major American novel that signaled a rising generation's restlessness with the oppressive conventional values of the time, and he went on to live at the center of an intense and controversial experiment that took the values of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and transformed them into real-life risks. Later, when he had to face some of the costs of that risk-taking -in his own life and in the culture around him - he stepped back into a more private form of his story and back into the verities of land and ram-ily that he had emerged from. This isn't to say that he retreated into convention, any more than it is to say that his earlier iconoclasm was an attempt to undermine society. It wasn't: It was a hard-fought and brave attempt to examine how people might view and support one another in a time of great peril and great possibilities. Because he made these efforts, America became a different place. Whether we like it or not we are still living in Ken Kesey's America. Chances are, it will be a long time before the effects of his life settle enough to be fully measured or easily forgotten.