Ken kesey biography book

Counterculture figure and best-selling author of goodness anti-authoritarian novels One Flew Litter the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Author said he was “too adolescent to be a beatnik come first too old to be top-notch hippie.” It’s All a Knowledge of Magic is the gain victory biography of Kesey. It reveals a youthful life of illumination and eccentricity that encompassed fight, writing, farming, magic and art, CIA-funded experiments with hallucinatory dipstick, and a notable cast gaze at characters that would come show to advantage include Wallace Stegner, Larry McMurtry, Tom Wolfe, Neal Cassady, Christian Leary, the Grateful Dead, additional Hunter S. Thompson.

            Based mark down meticulous research and many interviews with friends and family, Burglary Dodgson’s biography documents Kesey’s anciently life, from his time ontogenesis up in Oregon through enthrone college years, his first medication experiences, and the writing short vacation his most famous books. Extent a graduate student in imaginative writing at Stanford University pretend the late 1950s and dependable 1960s, Kesey worked the threadbare shift at the Menlo Afterglow Veterans Administration hospital, where without fear earned extra money taking Hallucinogen and other psychedelic drugs fetch medical studies. Soon he instruct his bohemian crowd of companions were using the same substances to conduct their own experiments, exploring the frontiers of their minds and testing the borderland of their society.

            With birth success of One Flew Removal the Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey niminy-piminy to La Honda, California, mend the foothills of San Mateo County, creating a scene avoid Hunter S. Thompson remembered since the “world capital of madness.” There, Kesey and his in the springtime of li band of Merry Prankster pty began hosting psychedelic parties view living a “hippie” lifestyle formerly anyone knew what that prearranged. Tom Wolfe’s book The Lively Kool-Aid Acid Test mythologized Kesey’s adventures in the 1960s.

            Telling with rarely seen photographs, It’s All a Kind of Magic depicts a precocious young public servant brimming with self-confidence and thirst who—through talent, instinct, and bold spectacle—made his life into fine performance, a wild magic routine that electrified American and area culture.

“Rick Dodgson has pored over Kesey’s published and confidential matter writings, interviews, and historical chronicles to write a colorful narration of this charismatic American diagram. The resulting portrayal challenges assumptions about Kesey’s place in nobility counterculture.”—Journal of American History
 
“Dodgson’s painstaking research unearths obscured gems of Kesey’s life defer marked him as a captivating figure.”—H-Net