One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

by Ken Kesey

Published in 1962, Ken Kesey’s most famous novel is set in a psychiatric ward inhabited by two groups of very different patients, the hopeless Chronics and the potentially curable Acutes. The narrator, Chief Bromden, describes Randle Patrick McMurphy’s revolt against the iron regime of Nurse Ratched, whose grip on the mental ward may be seen as emblematic of the surreal conformity Kesey identified as typical of postwar America.

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Ken Kesey (1935–2001) was just 24 when he took part in a government-sponsored drug trial that involved spending one morning a week in a psychiatric ward at Menlo Park Veterans Hospital. After taking ‘a couple of pills or a shot or a little glass of bitter juice’, Kesey would then wait for a doctor to record the effects of the various drugs, fascinated by the real mental patients he glimpsed through a small window in the door of his private room. ‘You get your visions through whatever gate you’re granted,’ he wrote later. ‘Patients straggled by in the hall outside, their faces all ghastly confessions.’