One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) is a novel written by Ken Kesey. It is set in an Oregon asylum, and serves as a study of the institutional process and the human mind. The novel was written in 1959 and published in 1962. The novel was adapted into a 1975 film, which won five Academy Awards. Time Magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. The story was adapted into a Broadway play by Dale Wass... more

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) is a novel written by Ken Kesey. It is set in an Oregon asylum, and serves as a study of the institutional process and the human mind. The novel was written in 1959 and published in 1962. The novel was adapted into a 1975 film, which won five Academy Awards. Time Magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. The story was adapted into a Broadway play by Dale Wasserman in 1963. The book's epigraph is: These are the last two lines of a nursery rhyme. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was a direct product of Kesey's time working the graveyard shift as an orderly at a mental health facility in Menlo Park, California. Not only did he speak to the patients and witness the workings of the institution, he took psychoactive drugs (Peyote and LSD) as part of Project MKULTRA. From this, he became sympathetic toward the patients. Kesey claimed he wrote the first three pages of the novel after ingesting eight peyote... less