It’s all a Kind of Magic: The Young Ken Kesey, by Rick Dodgson
Journal of History September 1, 2014 Chris Elcock
A new academic biography of Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and a central figure in the psychedelic counterculture, fills a gap in scholarship. Rick Dodgson traces Kesey's life from childhood through the completion of his second novel, focusing on his early performance instincts, graduate work in Palo Alto, and discovery of mind-altering drugs. Dodgson argues that Tom Wolfe's influential account of Kesey's psychedelic adventures in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is hyperbolic rather than factual. The Acid Tests involved only a few hundred people, and underground chemists like Augustus Owsley Stanley III had a much greater influence on spreading psychedelia. Kesey's influence was tempered by his 1966 exile from the San Francisco scene due to legal troubles.