text: Ken Kesey was born in 1935 in La Junta, Colorado to dairy farmers Frederick A. Kesey and Ginevra Smith. In 1946, the family moved to Springfield, Oregon. A champion wrestler in both high school and college, he graduated from Springfield High School in 1953.
  Kesey attended the University of Oregons School of Journalism, where he received a degree in speech and communication in 1957, where he was also a brother of Beta Theta Pi. He was awarded a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship in 1958 to enroll in the creative writing program at Stanford University, which he did the following year. While at Stanford, he studied under Wallace Stegner and began the manuscript that would become One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest.
  At Stanford in 1959, Kesey volunteered to take part in a CIA-financed study named Project MKULTRA at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital. The project studied the effects on the patients of psychoactive drugs, particularly LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, AMT, and DMT. Kesey wrote many detailed accounts of his experiences with these drugs, both during the Project MKULTRA study and in the years of private experimentation that followed. Keseys role as a medical guinea pig inspired him to write the book One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest in 1962. The success of the book, as well as the sale of his residence at Stanford, allowed him to move to La Honda, California in the mountains west of Stanford University. He frequently entertained friends and many others with parties he called "Acid Tests" involving music (such as Keseys favorite band, The Warlocks, later known as the Grateful Dead), black lights, fluorescent paint, strobes and other "psychedelic" effects, and, of course, LSD. These parties were noted in some of Allen Ginsbergs poems and are also described in the books The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe, Hells Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs by Hunter S. Thompson, and Freewheelin Frank, Secretary of the Hells Angels by Frank Reynolds. Ken Kesey was also said to have experimented with LSD with Ringo Starr in 1965 and that he influenced the setup for future performances with The Beatles in the UK.
  In the summer of 1964, Kesey's Merry Pranksters customized a bus named "Furthur" and set out on a tour to propagate LSD use.