Ken Kesey

American novelist and counterculture leader who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest while participating in government LSD experiments, then founded the Merry Pranksters — making him the bridge figure between the Beat Generation and the 1960s counterculture.

Created One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as the defining literary myth of institutional oppression versus authentic vitality, and through the Merry Pranksters enacted the counterculture's program of ego-dissolution and boundary transgression as a mode of psychic liberation.