Counterculture icon and best-selling author of the
anti-authoritarian novels One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and
Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey said he was ""too young to be a
beatnik and too old to be a hippie."" It's All a Kind of Magic is
the first biography of Kesey. It reveals a youthful life of
brilliance and eccentricity that encompassed wrestling, writing,
magic and ventriloquism, CIA-funded experiments with hallucinatory
drugs, and a notable cast of characters that would come to include
Wallace Stegner, Larry McMurtry, Tom Wolfe, Neal Cassady, Timothy
Leary, the Grateful Dead, and Hunter S. Thompson. A child of the
Depression, Kesey was born in 1935 to a migrant farming family that
settled in Oregon during World War II. Based on meticulous research
and many interviews with friends and family, Rick Dodgson's
biography documents Kesey's early life, from his time growing up in
Oregon as a farm boy and wrestling champion through his college
years, his first drug experiences, and the writing of his most
famous books. While a graduate student in creative writing at
Stanford University in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kesey worked
the night shift at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration hospital,
where he earned extra money taking LSD and other psychedelic drugs
for medical studies. Soon he and his bohemian crowd of friends were
using the same substances to conduct their own experiments,
exploring the frontiers of their minds and testing the boundaries
of their society. With the success of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's
Nest, Kesey moved to La Honda, California, in the foothills of San
Mateo County, creating a scene that Hunter S. Thompson remembered
as the ""world capital of madness."" There, Kesey and his growing
band of Merry Prankster friends began hosting psychedelic parties
and living a ""hippie"" lifestyle before anyone knew what that
meant. Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
mythologised Kesey's adventures in the 1960s. Illustrated with
rarely seen photographs, It's All a Kind of Magic depicts a
precocious young man brimming with self-confidence and ambition
who-through talent, instinct, and fearless spectacle-made his life
into a performance, a wild magic act that electrified American and
world culture.
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