Editing Ken Kesey (section)

=== ''One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'' ===
While enrolled at the University of Oregon in 1957, Kesey wrote ''End of Autumn''; according to Rick Dogson, the novel "focused on the exploitation of college athletes by telling the tale of a football lineman who was having second thoughts about the game".<ref name="ReferenceA">{{cite book |url=https://archive.org/details/itsallkindofmagi0000dodg |url-access=registration |page=[https://archive.org/details/itsallkindofmagi0000dodg/page/66 66] |quote=end of autumn kesey. |title=It's All a Kind of Magic: The Young Ken Kesey |first=Rick |last=Dodgson |date=2013 |publisher=University of Wisconsin Pres |access-date=March 6, 2017 |via=Internet Archive |isbn=978-0-299-29513-4}}</ref> Kesey came to regard the unpublished work as juvenilia, but an excerpt served as his Stanford Creative Writing Center application sample.<ref name="ReferenceA" />

During his Woodrow Wilson Fellowship year, Kesey wrote ''Zoo'', a novel about beatniks living in the [[North Beach, San Francisco, California|North Beach]] community of [[San Francisco]], but it was never published.<ref>{{Cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/11/nyregion/ken-kesey-author-of-cuckoo-s-nest-who-defined-the-psychedelic-era-dies-at-66.html |title=Ken Kesey, Author of 'Cuckoo's Nest,' Who Defined the Psychedelic Era, Dies at 66 |last=Lehmann-Haupt |first=Christopher |date=November 11, 2001 |work=The New York Times |access-date=June 10, 2018}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |title=It's All A Kind of Magic: The Young Ken Kesey |last=Dodgson |first=Rick |publisher=The University of Wisconsin Press |year=2013 |location=Madison |page=xv}}</ref>

The inspiration for ''[[One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (novel)|One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest]]'' came while Kesey was working the night shift with [[Gordon Lish]] at the [[Menlo Park, California|Menlo Park]] Veterans' Hospital. There, Kesey often spent time talking to the patients, sometimes under the influence of the hallucinogenic drugs he had volunteered to experiment with. He did not believe these patients were insane, but rather that society had pushed them out because they did not fit conventional ideas of how people were supposed to act and behave. Published under Cowley's guidance in 1962, the novel was an immediate success; in 1963, it was adapted into a successful [[One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (play)|stage play]] by [[Dale Wasserman]], and in 1975, [[Miloš Forman]] directed a [[One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (film)|screen adaptation]], which won the "Big Five" Academy Awards: [[Academy Award for Best Picture|Best Picture]], [[Academy Award for Best Actor|Best Actor]] ([[Jack Nicholson]]), [[Academy Award for Best Actress|Best Actress]] ([[Louise Fletcher]]), [[Academy Award for Best Director|Best Director]] (Forman) and [[Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay|Best Adapted Screenplay]] (Lawrence Hauben and [[Bo Goldman]]).<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.oscars.org/oscars/ceremonies/1976 |title=The 48th Academy Awards – 1976 |website=Oscars.org – Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences|date=October 4, 2014 }}</ref>

Kesey originally was involved in the film, but left two weeks into production. He claimed never to have seen the movie because of a dispute over the $20,000 he was initially paid for the film rights. Kesey loathed that, unlike the book, the film was not narrated by Chief Bromden, and he disagreed with [[Jack Nicholson]]'s casting as Randle McMurphy (he wanted [[Gene Hackman]]). Despite this, Faye Kesey has said that her husband was generally supportive of the film and pleased that it was made.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://mentalfloss.com/article/31001/11-authors-who-hated-movie-versions-their-books |title=11 Authors Who Hated the Movie Versions of Their Books |work=Mental Floss |access-date=December 14, 2014}}</ref>