NOVELIST, '60S FIGURE INSPIRED GENERATION

His Exploits Defined Era's Counterculture

Ken Kesey, the celebrated novelist and leader of the Merry Pranksters whose
acid-laced adventures and epic bus trips helped inspire a generation of
free spirits in the 1960s, died early Saturday in Eugene, Ore., after
surgery for liver cancer.

The author of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," which was based on his
experience working at a Menlo Park veterans' hospital, Kesey also was the
central figure in Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," a classic
non-fiction account of early '60s hippies and the social revolution they
helped to spark.

Kesey, 66, had suffered in recent years from a stroke and diabetes. Two
weeks ago, he underwent surgery to remove part of his liver. For the last
three decades, he had lived a relatively quiet life on an Oregon farm. But
Kesey is forever associated with the Bay Area, when it was a hotbed of
youthful idealism, noisy exuberance and radical cultural change.

"He did change the world," said Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir, a
longtime friend of Kesey. "People these days are a lot more willing to
question authority than they were before he came along. He was a great man,
a giant beyond literary terms. He was and remains for me a boundless spirit."

Pranksters Antics

Wolfe's book told the story of Kesey and his friends -- a loose-knit
menagerie of artists and writers, flower children, Hells Angels and future
rock stars -- as they experimented with LSD in the redwood groves of La
Honda and drove a rainbow-colored bus across the country to New York City,
freaking out squares along the way.

"The Pranksters served as pioneers. It was like a traveling theater troupe,
spreading the counterculture like Johnny Appleseed," said Kesey's friend
Paul Krassner, a political satirist and prominent anti-establishment
commentator on the times.

In some regards, Kesey's true passion may have been as architect of those
public antics. Or, as he said when Wolfe asked why he was taking a break
from writing books: "I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph."

Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and fellow passenger on
some of the Pranksters' bus trips, said Kesey "was writing a story in real
time, populating it with real characters and sweeping people up in that story."

Years later, some of Kesey's crew would renounce their hedonistic ways.
Sandy Lehmann-Haupt, another well-known Prankster, struggled for years with
mental illness that he blamed partly on excessive drug use. Lehmann-Haupt
died of a heart attack last month at age 59.

But even before the Pranksters embraced the joys of sex, drugs and loud
music, Kesey had published a successful first novel that helped define the
decade's rebellious mood.

His Writing Career

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," published in 1962 and later made into an
Oscar-winning movie starring Jack Nicholson, told the bittersweet story of
a prisoner who feigns insanity to beat the system. In the book, Kesey
"exalted a kind of deliberate madness," social historian Todd Gitlin said.
"He meant the whole hospital system to stand for society."

Kesey's second novel, "Sometimes a Great Notion," was published in 1964 and
also drew critical praise. Though lesser-known, it is considered by many
fans to be his masterwork. The book tells an epic story about an Oregon
logging family and two sons -- a tough, almost brutish older brother and
his younger, intellectual sibling -- who join forces to save the family's
struggling business.

None of his later books received anywhere near the same acclaim. Kesey once
admitted to some frustration over that fact, although friends said he was
happy trying new things, including playing the harmonica, writing
children's stories and raising a family of his own.

Ken Elton Kesey was born in Colorado in 1935, the son of dairy farmers who
moved to Oregon when he was a child. After graduating from the University
of Oregon, where he wrestled and did some acting in campus plays, Kesey
moved to the Bay Area to attend the graduate writing program at Stanford in
1958.

He also volunteered as a subject for experiments on the effects of LSD at
the U.S. veterans' hospital in Menlo Park, for which he was paid $75 a day.
And he worked as a night attendant in the hospital's mental ward, where he
gathered material for "Cuckoo's Nest."

The Cabin In La Honda

With money from his first book, Kesey bought a two-bedroom cabin in the
Santa Cruz Mountains hamlet of La Honda, soon to become the center of an
eclectic lifestyle shared with an ever-shifting group of friends.

"It was a house and some outbuildings," recalled Lee Quarnstrom, a former
Mercury News columnist who met Kesey as a young reporter assigned to
interview the novelist for the San Mateo Times. "There was a bunch of
people who came and went. One guy, Paul Foster, lived in a treehouse. Some
people slept in their cars."

Quarnstrom was so taken with what he saw that he decided to stay: "Every
Saturday night, we'd have something happening: Most people would take LSD.
We'd play on these sort of improvised instruments -- one was called the
Thunder Machine; it was made out of big pieces of metal. We just made noise
and music and had a good time."

LSD was legal then and relatively easy to obtain. Members of the Hells
Angels motorcycle gang came by to party. Later, so did members of a
little-known rock band called the Warlocks -- who would become the Grateful
Dead.

Kesey "made it plain to us that the page was blank and it was up to us to
fill it," said the Dead's Weir. "We set about doing that. Those early acid
tests are where we learned to wander onto the stage and start playing, with
no idea of where we were going to end up."

Police raided the cabin in 1965 and Kesey was arrested on a marijuana
charge. The group moved to Santa Cruz late that year, but Kesey was
arrested again on a new drug charge in San Francisco. The novelist fled to
Mexico for several months, but eventually returned and served several
months on a San Mateo County work farm. After his release, he moved to a
farm in Oregon where he and his wife, Faye, raised four children.

Soon after they moved, Kesey's adventures were celebrated in "The Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test," which was published in 1968 and recounted the Merry
Pranksters' bus trips and "acid tests," the '60s LSD-fueled precursor of raves.

The Pranksters drove to the New York World's Fair in their brightly painted
1939 school bus, with Beat Generation hero Neal Cassady -- inspiration for
Jack Kerouac's novel "On the Road" -- behind the wheel. A placard over the
driver's window spelled out their ultimate destination: "Furthur."

The bus was stocked with gallons of acid-spiked fruit juice, equipped with
musical instruments and topped off with a makeshift viewing platform on the
roof. Krassner described the bus as "the traveling commune equivalent of
the circus that you wanted to run away with."

Chief Prankster Kesey would later say his only goal was to convince people
that "it is possible to be different without being a threat." But a
catch-phrase from that trip -- "You're either on the bus or off the bus" --
would become a popular slogan for many who viewed the '60s as a time when
social rules and values had to change.

"It was a mythic, self-mythologizing operation," Gitlin said of the bus trip.

Still, if Kesey had become an icon for the counterculture, he shied away
from mass protests on behalf of peace, civil rights and other causes of the
day. "He was an anarchist," Gitlin said. "He was obviously ill-at-ease with
big social movements."

After moving to Oregon, Kesey published more books and short stories and
taught college writing seminars. He struggled with grief over the death of
his son Jed, who was killed in 1984 when a van carrying the University of
Oregon wrestling team overturned on an icy road.

Friends say Kesey had a soft spot for kids. "He was a good guy to
children," said Eileen Babbs, whose husband Ken was a fellow Prankster and
one of Kesey's best friends. "A lot of children will miss him. He always
had magic tricks, always had time to talk to them."

More recently, Kesey had dabbled in video-making and computers. Over the
years, Kesey's rambling red farmhouse in Pleasant Hill, Ore., was a
frequent destination for old cohorts from the '60s, as well as for a new
generation of dropouts, rebels and seekers of truth -- who would arrive
hoping just to meet the famous Prankster.

Kesey occasionally grumbled about these starry-eyed visitors when they
arrived unannounced. But though he sometimes acted as if he had dropped out
of the counterculture -- he even joined the PTA, Krassner said -- Kesey
still kept the old bus, rusted and fading, parked in his yard.