"I saw that everything that you see from this position, if you're also able to see it from over here, you've got two views of it."
Kesey attended a course led by the novelist Wallace Stegner at the Stanford Creative Writing Program.
Kesey's first work was an unpublished novel, ZOO, about the beatniks of the North Beach community in San Francisco.
Tom Wolfe has described in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) Kesey and his friends, called the Merry Pranksters, as they travelled the country and used all kinds of hallucinogens.
These experiences - and a vision of an Indian sweeping there the floor - formed the background for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, set in a mental hospital. While writing the book, and continuing in the footsteps of such writers as Thomas De Quincy (Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 1821), Aldous Huxley (The Doors of Perception, 1954), and William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch, 1959).
Kesey took peyote and his favorite, LSD. With his new, increased perception, Kesey felt being "dimensional", explaining in his words, "I saw that everything that you see from this position, if you're also able to see it from over here, you've got two views of it."
The inspiration for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest came while working on the night shift (with Gordon Lish) at the Menlo Park 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, rather that society had pushed them out because they did not fit the conventional ideas of how people were supposed to act and behave. Published in 1962, it was an immediate success.
Kesey's first work was an unpublished novel, ZOO, about the beatniks of the North Beach community in San Francisco.
Tom Wolfe has described in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) Kesey and his friends, called the Merry Pranksters, as they travelled the country and used all kinds of hallucinogens.
These experiences - and a vision of an Indian sweeping there the floor - formed the background for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, set in a mental hospital. While writing the book, and continuing in the footsteps of such writers as Thomas De Quincy (Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 1821), Aldous Huxley (The Doors of Perception, 1954), and William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch, 1959).
Kesey took peyote and his favorite, LSD. With his new, increased perception, Kesey felt being "dimensional", explaining in his words, "I saw that everything that you see from this position, if you're also able to see it from over here, you've got two views of it."
The inspiration for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest came while working on the night shift (with Gordon Lish) at the Menlo Park 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, rather that society had pushed them out because they did not fit the conventional ideas of how people were supposed to act and behave. Published in 1962, it was an immediate success.