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One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
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“Powerful, poetic realism…makes the tired old subject of life in a mental hospital into an absorbing Orwellian microcosm of all humanity.”—Life.
An international bestseller and the basis for a hugely successful film, Ken Kesey‘s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was one of the defining works of the 1960s. This Viking Critical Library edition is accompanied by essays, discussion topics, a chronology, and a bibliography.
A mordant, wickedly subversive parable set in a mental ward, the novel chronicles the head-on collision between its hell-raising, life-affirming hero Randle Patrick McMurphy and the totalitarian rule of Big Nurse. McMurphy swaggers into the mental ward like a blast of fresh air and turns the place upside down, starting a gambling operation, smuggling in wine and women, and egging on the other patients to join him in open rebellion. But McMurphy’s revolution against Big Nurse and everything she stands for quickly turns from sport to a fierce power struggle with shattering results.
With One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey created a work without precedent in American literature, a novel at once comic and tragic that probes the nature of madness and sanity, authority and vitality. Greeted by unanimous acclaim when it was first published, the book has become and enduring favorite of readers.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s NestIntroduction
Chronology
I. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: The Text
II. The Author and His Work
TOM WOLFE, What Do You Think of My Buddha?
KEN KESEY, An Early Draft of the Opening Scene of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
KEN KESEY, Letter to Ken Babbs: [”Peyote and Point of View”]
KEN KESEY, Letter to Ken Babbs: [”People on the Ward”]
KEN KESEY, Characters on the Ward
KEN KESEY, Draft Page with Holograph Revisions
KEN KESEY, from An Impolite Interview with Ken Kesey
KEN KESEY, from Ken Kesey Was a Successful Dope Fiend
KEN KESEY, Who Flew Over What?
III. Literary Criticism
JACK F. MCCOMB, The RPM
LESLIE A. FIEDLER, The Higher Sentimentality
TERRY G. SHERWOOD, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the Comic Strip
JAMES E. MILLER, JR., The Humor in the Horror
JOSEPH J. WALDMEIR, Two Novelists of the Absurd: Heller and Kesey
JOHN A. BARSNESS, Ken Kesey: The Hero in Modern Dress
IRVING MALIN, Ken Kesey: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
ROBERT BOYERS, Porno-Politics
HAROLD CLURMAN, Review of the Play
WALTER KERR, …And the Young Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
MARCIA L. FALK, Letter to the Editor of The New York Times
LESLIE HORST, Bitches, Twitches, and Eunuchs: Sex-Role Failure and Caricature
ANNETTE BENERT, The Voices of Fear: Kesey’s Anatomy of Insanity
BENJAMIN GOLUBOFF, The Carnival Artist in the Cuckoo’s Nest
MARSHA MCCREADIE, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Some Reasons for One Happy Adaptation
CAROL PEARSON, The Cowboy Saint and the Indian Poet: The Comic Hero in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
IV. Analogies and Perspectives
DALE WASSERMAN, from his play One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
MARY FRANCES ROBINSON, Ph.D., and WALTER FREEMAN, M.D., Ph.D., F.A.C.P., Glimpses of Postlobotomy Personalities
ARTHUR P. NOYES, M.D., and LAWRENCE C. KOLB, M.D., Shock and Other Physical Therapies
RALPH ELLISON, from Invisible Man
ROBERT PENN WARREN, from All the King’s Men
KEN KESEY, Neal Cassady
JACK KEROUAC, from On the Road
Topics for Discussion and Papers
Selected Bibliography prepared by Joseph Weixlmann and M. Gilbert Porter
“A work of genuine literary merit . . . What Mr. Kesey has done in his unusual novel is to transform the plight of a ward of inmates in a mental hospital into a glittering parable of good and evil.”
–The New York Times Book Review
“[A] brilliant first novel . . . a strong, warm story about the nature of human good and evil . . . Keysey has made his book a roar of protest against middlebrow society’s Rules and the invisible Rulers who enforce them.”
–Time
“The final triumph of these men at the cost of a terrifying sacrifice should send chills down any reader’s back. . . . This novel’s scenes have the liveliness of a motion picture.”
–The Washington Post
“An outstanding book . . . [Kesey’s] characters are original and real. . . . This is a tirade against the increasing controls over man and his mind, yet the author never gets on a soap box. Nor does he forget that there is a thin line between tragedy and comedy.”
–Houston Chronicle
Ken Kesey was born in 1935 and grew up in Oregon. He graduated from the University of Oregon and later studied at Stanford with Wallace Stegner, Malcolm Cowley, Richard Scowcroft, and Frank O’ Connor. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, his first novel, was published in 1962. His second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, followed in 1964. His other books include Kesey’s Garage Sale, Demon Box, Caverns (with O. U. Levon), The Further Inquiry, Sailor Song, and Last Go Round (with Ken Babbs). His two children’s books are Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear and The Sea Lion. Ken Kesey died on November 10, 2001.Sketches
Psychedelic sixties. God knows whatever that means it certainly meant far more than drugs, though drugs still work as a pretty good handle to the phenomena.
I grabbed at that handle. Legally, too, I might add. Almost patriotically, in fact. Early psychedelic sixties…
Eight o’clock every Tuesday morning I showed up at the vet’s hospital in Menlo Park, ready to roll. The doctor deposited me in a little room on his ward, dealt me a couple of pills or a shot or a little glass of bitter juice, then locked the door. He checked back every forty minutes to see if I was still alive, took some tests, asked some questions, left again. The rest of the time I spent studying the inside of my forehead, or looking out the little window in the door. It was six inches wide and eight inches high, and it had heavy chicken wire inside the glass.
You get your visions through whatever gate you’re granted.
Patients straggled by in the hall outside, their faces all ghastly confessions. Sometimes I looked at them and sometimes they looked at me. but rarely did we look at one another. It was too naked and painful. More was revealed in a human face than a human being can bear, face-to-face.
Sometimes the nurse came by and checked on me. Her face was different. It was painful business, but not naked. This was not a person you could allow yourself to be naked in front of.
Six months or so later I had finished the drug experiments and applied for a job. I was taken on as a nurse’s aide, in the same ward, with the same doctor, under the same nurse—and you must understand we’re talking about a huge hospital here! It was weird.
But, as I said, it was the sixties.
Those faces were still there, still painfully naked. To ward them off my case I very prudently took to carrying around a little notebook, to scribble notes. I got a lot of compliments from nurses: “Good for you, Mr. Kesey. That’s the spirit. Get to know these men.”
I also scribbled faces. No, that’s not correct. As I prowl through this stack of sketches I can see that these faces bored their way behind my forehead and scribbled themselves. I just held the pen and waited for the magic to happen.
This was, after all, the sixties.
Ken Kesey
US
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| Dimensions | 1.2300 × 5.0700 × 7.7000 in |
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