Ken Kesey

I feel unqualified to judge Kesey. When beat writing emerged from jive talk, it's literary adherents where young and up to the task of redefining literature. For all the talk of Don Quixote being the first modern novel... our present literary fiction bears much more similarity to thsi work. There were others surely, Go by John Clellon Holmes, and On the Road by Kerouac but these were biographical. Kesey tacked the other beast, the novel. in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest he also took a tip from Guy de Maupassant, with a narrator who is insane.

"The worker takes the scalpel and slices up the front of old Blastic with a clean swing and the old man stops thrashing around. I expect to be sick, but there's no blood or innards falling out like I was looking to see-just a shower of rust and ashes, and now and again a peice of wire or glass."

Roman Proske

To my knowledge he wrote nothing other than his autobiography. the book is pretty bad, if his life wasn't so interesting, the book would be outright hopeless. The play-by-play is great, but the color is lacking. His observations are few, leaving the text thin. But once, he makes a strange poetic observation.

"The thought that my lions were housed in the same den that had been occupied by the lions of Rome two thousand years before, that I was treading the same ground where the spectacle of the circus had it's origins, moved me deeply. I felt a kinship with more forebears, the gladiators, so long turned to dust, who had once faced death here, and triumphed or gone under. This dry, sunbaked earth that had known the taste of blood of men and beasts was sacred to me."

The lions are no metaphor. He was a lion tamer. But when first browsing, I didn't know that. I think as much as I like it, I liked it better when the lions were a vague idea of something regal but menacing.