Literary Birthday – 17 September – Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey was born on 17 September 1935 and died on 10 November 2001.

Ken Kesey Quotes

1. What I always wanted to be was a magician… My real upbringing when I was a teenager was doing magic shows, all over the state, with my father and brothers. Doing magic, you not only have to be able to do a trick, you have to have a little story line to go with it. And writing is essentially a trick.
2. To hell with facts! We need stories!
3. If you’re a Conservative, why aren’t you behind conserving the land?
4. Me and Norman Mailer have talked about how hard it is in America to get better. Especially at writing.
5. When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn’t writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.
6. Truth doesn’t run on time like a commuter train.
7. I sometimes have these spells of compulsive truth. But as Lady Macbeth would say, ‘The fit is momentary.’
8. There’s no better way in the world to aggravate somebody who’s trying to make it hard for you than by acting like you’re not bothered.
9. Kerouac had lots of class—stumbling drunk in the end, but read those last books. He never blames anybody else; he always blames himself.
10. He who marches out of line hears another drum.

Ken Kesey was an American novelist, essayist, and countercultural figure. He studied creative writing at Stanford University, where he was a fellow alongside writers including Wendell Berry, Robert Stone, Peter Beagle, and Larry McMurtry. Kesey is best known for his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Published in 1962, it challenged institutional authority and explored freedom, individuality, and the treatment of people considered outsiders. The novel was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film in 1975. His other works include Sometimes a Great Notion, Demon Box, and Sailor Song. Kesey saw himself as a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the counterculture of the 1960s. He also became famous for his psychedelic experiments and as the leader of the Merry Pranksters, a group of artists and countercultural figures who travelled across America in a brightly painted bus. Their adventures were chronicled by New Journalism writer Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Source for image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ken_Kesey_(One_Flew_Over_the_Cuckoo%27s_Nest_photo).jpg
Jacket design by Paul Bacon Author photo by Hank Kranzler, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson
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