1. BY KENKESEY ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST

2. KEN KESEY Raised in Springfield, OR. Bachelors at University of Oregon. Did his graduate work at Stanford.

3. KESEY AND THE CIA While at Stanford, Kesey met a Psychology student Vik Lovell. Kesey volunteered to be a human guinea pig in a CIA finance study of Project MKUltra, a highly secretive military program, at a Veterans Hospital where he worked as a night aide. MKUltra studied the effects of psychoactive drugs (for Kesey LSD), on how to manipulate brain functions and mental states (i.e. loss of memory, illogical thinking, impulsiveness, “brain-washing”). Many of MKUltra’s test cases didn’t know the drugs they were taking, or the aim of the mission. One stated purpose of Project MKUltra: find a way to get to Fidel Castro.

4. KESEY AND THE NOVEL The inspiration for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest came while working on the night shift at the a Veterans' Hospital. There, Kesey often spent time talking to the patients, sometimes under the influence of the hallucinogenic drugs with which he had volunteered to experiment. Kesey did not believe that these patients were insane, but rather that society had pushed them out because they did not fit the conventional ideas of how people were supposed to act and behave.

5. KESEY AND THE MERRY PRANKSTERS “I was too young to be a Beatnik, but too you to be a hippie” – Ken Kesey His presence was required in New York, so Kesey, Neal Cassady, and others in a group of friends they called the "Merry Pranksters" took a cross-country trip in a school bus nicknamed “Further". This trip, described in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool- Aid Acid Test (and later in Kesey's own screenplay "The Further Inquiry") was the group's attempt to create art out of everyday life.

6. FURTHER

7. COINED THE PHRASE: EITHER YOUR ON THE BUS, OR YOUR OFF THE BUS.

8. THE AFTERMATH

9. SO WHY IS CUCKOO’S NEST IMPORTANT Highlights the belief that even if you know society will beat you down, you still fight. Highlights the reality of the two tensions still going on today: Racial and Gender.