It's All a Kind of Magic

August 26, 2013
“Kesey’s name is so identified with the sixties that it is easy to forget that he was a product of the forties and fifties,” writes Lakeland College historian Dodgson in his pleasant, if slight biography of the charismatic author’s early life. Exploring the forces that influenced Kesey—best known as the author of One Flew over the Cukoo’s Nest and, later, as a member of the Merry Pranksters—Dodgson places the author in his historical context. The volume follows Kesey from his birth in Colorado in 1935 through his years at the University of Oregon, to the famed Stanford University writing program that also nurtured Larry McMurtry and Robert Stone. Kesey took part in early LSD experimentation, and Dodgson does an excellent job of describing the drug culture of the era. Since Dodgson only takes his subject up to the early 1960s and J.F.K.’s assassination, he leaves readers tantalizingly looking ahead to the tumultuous late ’60s. Dodgson’s preface entertainingly explains how he came to write about Kesey for his dissertation, eventually meeting the man himself. Kesey allowed the young historian access to his personal papers, and, along with his Prankster cohort Ken Babbs, proved supportive and enthusiastic. Unfortunately, permission to quote from the unpublished sources was rescinded, and the book reflects the absence of Kesey’s unfettered voice. Photos.

July 15, 2013
A British scholar unearths the roots of one of the 20th century's most brash and colorful writers and public figures. Blame Tom Wolfe and that damn bus. Due to the image of novelist Ken Kesey (1935-2001), popularized in the pages of Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the writer has been nearly doomed to historical obscurity as the drug-addled leader of the Merry Pranksters. In fact, Kesey was a brilliant, sensitive and ambitious creator, as interested in the act of performance as he was in the accolades of critical success. In this slim biography, Dodgson (History/Lakeland Coll.) examines how Kesey's early influences, his contemporaries and the times he was born into all shaped his evolution from literary lion to ringleader of the countercultural circus. Dodgson first met Kesey in 1999, shortly before the author's untimely death. While the young scholar is careful not to imply a true friendship with the author, he displays an obvious giddiness at meeting the icon; Dodgson seems more in awe at Kesey's collection of artifacts than in the man himself. The author provides a fairly straightforward examination of Kesey's early life and works, with special attention paid to the bohemian scene around Perry Lane near Stanford University and the development of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion. Dodgson does turn up a few unexpected gems from a largely unreported era of Kesey's life, including anecdotes about fellow travelers like Neal Cassady and Ken Babbs. But, much like the collective hangover left over from the 1960s, the book also suffers from the same revisionist romanticism that dogged Kesey's remaining decades. "Theirs was not a revolution of guns and glory," Dodgson writes. "It was a new type of revolution: one of morals, of manners, and of the mind." Heavy, man. A missed opportunity to put one of America's truly unique writers in a larger historical context.

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September 15, 2013

In his first book and the first-ever biography of American novelist Ken Kesey (1935-2001), Dodgson (history, Lakeland Coll.) delivers an engaging, accessible narrative that strives to redress the predominant image of Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) as a pied piper of LSD. This notion, originating in Tom Wolfe's 1968 hyperbolic classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and reinforced countless times elsewhere, has overshadowed Kesey's contributions to literature and obscured his real life. Covering Kesey's birth through 1964, Dodgson's work stops just short of the "Acid Test" years that gave rise to the myth. Despite this limitation, a detailed picture of the "real" Kesey--farm boy, magician, wrestler, actor, family man, patriot, teetotaler, shaman, and self-proclaimed conservative--emerges. This is largely owing to Dodgson's unique research, which includes personal interviews with the writer and full access to a family archive of letters and unpublished work. VERDICT Dodgson's enthusiasm for his subject, plus his carefully chosen historical asides and examination of Kesey's creative process, should extend this book's appeal beyond the Merry Pranksters. For fans of literary biography, students of the counterculture, and aspiring writers, this biography disappoints somewhat in its brevity but succeeds in illuminating the man behind the myth.--Chris Wieman, Univ. of the Sciences Libs., Philadelphia

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