In the wee hours of Saturday morning, Ken Kesey — writer, prankster, teacher and family man — died at Sacred Heart Medical Center, where he was being treated for complications from liver surgery.
Two weeks ago, doctors removed a tumor from the 66-year-old Kesey’s liver. On Tuesday, his condition deteriorated and he was moved to the hospital’s intensive care unit, where he was given dialysis and placed on a respirator. At 4:30 a.m. Saturday, Kesey slipped away
Prior to Kesey’s death, family friend Phillip Dietz said that people were “holding up well” and that whatever happened, the family would remain strong.
“This is a very close family,” Dietz said. “They really love Ken a lot.”
On Sunday afternoon, friends and family gathered at his Pleasant Hill property to make arrangements for the funeral. In honor of Kesey’s memory, members of his extended and immediate family built his coffin and dug his grave.
“It’s very beautiful to watch,” Kesey’s daughter Sunshine said. “My father had a lot of friends and family here in the community.”
A memorial service at McDonald Theatre was tentatively planned for the middle of this week, she said. Kesey is survived by his mother, Geneva Jolley; his wife, Faye; his son, Zane; his daughters, Shannon Smith and Sunshine Kesey); his brother, Chuck Kesey; and three grandchildren.
Kesey, who graduated from the University in 1958 with a Bachelor of Science in speech, first caught the public eye in the early 1960s, when his novels “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Sometimes a Great Notion” became massive commercial and critical successes. Not yet 30 years old, Kesey — who had studied at Stanford with such 1960s icons as Allen Ginsberg and had been involved in drug experiments in a California veterans’ hospital — found himself the object of national acclaim.
But his fame came with a price. Between 1965 and 1967, Kesey was arrested several times for possession of marijuana, and his ranch in La Honda, Calif., became a routine target for local police looking to curb the growth of the counterculture movement that Kesey was helping to shape. In 1968, after touring the country and pulling off all manner of mad stunts with his band of Merry Pranksters — as chronicled in such books as Tom Wolfe’s “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” and Hunter S. Thompson’s “Hell’s Angels” — Kesey returned to Oregon. With his wife Faye, he bought a farm in Pleasant Hill, settled into the community and raised four children.
In 1987, Kesey returned to the University to work as an instructor in the Master of Fine Arts creative writing program. By June of 1988, he and 13 graduate students in his class had completed the novel “Caverns,” which was published in 1989 under the pseudonym O. U. Levon.
George Wickes, emeritus professor of English, who first met Kesey in the mid 1970s, said that his time as a teacher typified the way Kesey dealt with his status as a University alumnus.
“Kesey always had an ambiguous relationship with the University,” Wickes said. “He didn’t have much to do with the University in the last few years, but I can still remember some of the hoo-hahs he put on.”
The 1990s were a time of renewed creativity for Kesey. He published “The Further Inquiry,” a screenplay, in 1990; two children’s books, “Little Tricker the Squirrel meets Big Double the Bear” in 1990 and “The Sea Lion” in 1991; and two novels, “Sailor Song” and “Last Go Round” — the latter with author Ken Babbs — in 1992 and 1994, respectively. In 1997, he suffered a small stroke, but continued his involvement in the community. On Halloween 2000, Kesey and the Merry Pranksters headlined a Green Party benefit in Agate Hall. Wickes, who worked as an advisor to the University’s literary magazine, the Northwest Review, in 1977, called Kesey a “great showman.” But he was quick to add that, in his opinion, Kesey will be remembered more for his landmark early novels than for his free-wheeling days as a prankster.
“He kind of personified the ’60s — which was mostly Tom Wolfe’s doing,” Wickes said. “But in the long run, I think he’ll be remembered most for ‘Cuckoo’s Nest.’ It’s one of the great books of the second half of the 20th century, and I think it will continue to be taught in literature courses.” For her part, Sunshine Kesey said she hopes the message behind the novels is what people remember about her father.
“He beat the drum of freedom, pretty much all the time,” she said. “His message was to be as big as you have it in you to be.”