Find a Job Post a Job Real Estate Automobiles ... Text Version Today's News Past Week Past 30 Days Past 90 Days Past Year Since 1996 Sign Up Log In Go to Advanced Search November 11, 2001 OBITUARIES Ken Kesey, Author of 'Cuckoo's Nest,' Is Dead at 66 By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT The Associated Press Ken Kesey and the magic bus, in which he made his LSD-fueled cross-country trip. en Kesey, the Pied Piper of the psychedelic era, who was best known as the author of the novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," died yesterday in a hospital in Eugene, Ore., said his wife, Faye. He was 66 and lived in Pleasant Hill, Ore. The cause was complications after surgery for liver cancer late last month, said his friend and business associate, Ken Babbs. Mr. Kesey was also well known as the hero of Tom Wolfe's nonfiction book about psychedelic drugs, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" (1968). An early flowering of Mr. Wolfe's innovative new-journalism style, the book somewhat mockingly compared Mr. Kesey to the leaders of the world's great religions, dispensing to his followers not spiritual balm but quantities of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, to enhance their search for the universe within themselves. The book's narrative focused on a series of quests undertaken by Mr. Kesey in the 1960's. First, there was the transcontinental trip with a band of friends he named the Merry Pranksters, aboard a 1939 International Harvester bus called Further (it was painted as "Furthur" on the bus). It was wired for sound and painted riotously in Day-Glo colors. Neal Cassady, the Dean Moriarty of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," was recruited to drive. The journey, which took the Pranksters from La Honda, Calif., to New York City and back, was timed to coincide with the 1964 New York World's Fair. Its purposes were to film and tape an extended movie, to experience roadway America while high on acid and to practice "tootling the multitudes," as Mr. Wolfe put it, referring to the way a Prankster would stand with a flute on the bus's roof and play sounds to imitate people's various reactions to the bus. | |
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