It’s the birthday of Ken Kesey (1935-2001), professional hippie and author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), the film version of which (1976) won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Writing (Screenplay Adapted from Other Material).

NB: Kesey himself started out working on the film but left in a snit after a couple of weeks. For one thing, he wanted Gene Hackman, not Jack Nicholson, to play the lead. He later claimed that he never watched the film.

Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado, moved with his family to Oregon when he was about 11, and studied at the University of Oregon; while there, he eloped with his childhood sweetheart. They had three children and stayed married for life, though Kesey (with his wife’s blessing) also fathered a daughter named Sunshine with Carolyn Adams; Sunshine’s stepfather was Jerry Garcia. So there’s that. After the U of Oregon, Kesey studied creative writing at Stanford.

During this time, Kesey also volunteered to be a guinea pig in the CIA’s secret studies of psychedelic drugs, including LSD, which eventually led to Kesey’s “liberating” some of the LSD and having LSD-fueled parties attended by the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Tom Wolfe, and the band that eventually would become The Grateful Dead. Kesey’s experiences with these drugs, as well as his stint as an aide at the hospital, formed the basis for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

(My son’s third grade class has an actual guinea pig as a pet. The guinea pig’s name is Reese, he’s sweet-tempered and loves lettuce, and he never experiments with mind-altering drugs, instantly making him a better role model for third graders than any of the brilliant people mentioned in the previous paragraph. Just saying.)

Among Kesey’s other works are the novel Sometimes a Great Notion (1964); several nonfiction books about his adventures with the Merry Pranksters (fellow hippies and experimenters) such as Kesey’s Garage Sale (1973) and Demon Box (1986); the children’s book Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear (1988); and the neowestern novel Last Go Round (1994).

Kesey died at 66 of complications after having surgery on his liver.

Have a cool and sunny Tuesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.