| rdfs:comment | - Ken Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado, to dairy farmers Frederick A. Kesey and Geneva (Smith). In 1946, the family moved to Springfield, Oregon. Kesey was a champion wrestler in both high school and college in the 174 pound weight division, and he almost qualified to be on the Olympic team until a serious shoulder injury stopped his wrestling career. He graduated from Springfield High School in 1953. An avid reader and filmgoer, the young Kesey took John Wayne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Zane Grey as his role models (later naming a son Zane) and toyed with magic, ventriloquism, and hypnotism.
|
| abstract | - Ken Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado, to dairy farmers Frederick A. Kesey and Geneva (Smith). In 1946, the family moved to Springfield, Oregon. Kesey was a champion wrestler in both high school and college in the 174 pound weight division, and he almost qualified to be on the Olympic team until a serious shoulder injury stopped his wrestling career. He graduated from Springfield High School in 1953. An avid reader and filmgoer, the young Kesey took John Wayne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Zane Grey as his role models (later naming a son Zane) and toyed with magic, ventriloquism, and hypnotism. In 1956, while attending college at the University of Oregon in neighboring Eugene, Kesey eloped with his high-school sweetheart, Norma "Faye" Haxby, whom he had met in seventh grade. They had three children, Jed, Zane, and Shannon; Kesey had another child, Sunshine, in 1966 with fellow Merry Prankster Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Adams. A brother of Beta Theta Pi, Kesey graduated from the University of Oregon's School of Journalism with a degree in speech and communication in 1957. After a brief sojourn in Los Angeles, he was awarded a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship in 1958; because he lacked the prerequisites to work toward a master's degree in English, he elected to enroll in the creative writing program at Stanford University that fall, where he would develop lifelong friendships with fellow writers Ken Babbs, Larry McMurtry, Wendell Berry, Ed McClanahan, Gurney Norman, and Robert Stone. While at Stanford, Kesey resided on Perry Lane (a historically bohemian enclave adjacent to the university golf course) and clashed with program director Wallace Stegner; according to Stone, Stegner "saw Kesey... as a threat to civilization and intellectualism and sobriety" and rejected Kesey's Stegner Fellowship applications for the 1959-60 and 1960-61 terms. Nevertheless, Kesey received the $2,000 Harper-Saxton Prize for his first novel in progress (the oft-rejected Zoo) and continued to audit the graduate writing seminar through 1960 (taught that year by Frank O'Connor and the more congenial Malcolm Cowley) on a Ford Foundation fellowship granted by Leslie Fiedler as he began the manuscript that would become One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
|
