Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters

Ken Kesey (1935–2001) was best known as the author of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962); as an early proponent of the use of the hallucinogen LSD; as the leader of a communal group called the Merry Pranksters; and, although he saw himself as “too young to be a beatnik and too old to be a hippie,” as a leading figure of the counterculture. Kesey was born into a conventional family, the son of Colorado dairy farmers who married his high school sweetheart and missed the Olympic wrestling team only because of a shoulder injury. He saw his life change while attending Stanford in 1959, when he volunteered to participate in a CIA-sponsored study of the effects of LSD and other hallucinogens. Soon thereafter he moved to a log cabin south of San Francisco, where he hosted a series of parties known as “Acid Tests” that featured LSD and psychedelic lighting effects and where the house band was the Warlocks (a group that would later change their name to the Grateful Dead). Kesey’s exploits found their way into the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, into the novelist Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) and into the journalist Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966).