Ken Kesey 美国文学教学教案.doc

Ken Kesey 1935-2001 American writer, who gained world fame with his novel ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOOS NEST (1962, filmed 1975). In the 1960s, Kesey became a counterculture hero and a guru of psychedelic drugs with Timothy Leary. Kesey has been called the Pied Piper, who changed the beat generation into the hippie movement. I think McMurphy knew better than we did that our tough looks were all show, because he still wasnt able to get a real laugh out of anybody. Maybe he couldnt understand why we werent able to laugh yet, but he knew you cant really be strong until you see a funny side to things. In fact, he worked so hard of pointing out the funny side of things that I was wondering a little if maybe he was blind to the other side, if maybe he wasnt able to see what it was that parched laughter deep inside your stomach. (from One Flew Over Cuckoos Nest) Ken Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado, and brought up in Eugene, Oregon. His father worked in the creamery business, in which he was eventually successful after founding the Eugene Farmers Cooperative. Kesey spent his early years hunting, fishing, swimming; he learned to box and wrestle, and he was a star football player. He studied at the University of Oregon, where he acted in college plays. On graduating he won a scholarship to Stanford University. Kesey soon dropped out, joined the counterculture movement, and began experimenting with drugs. In 1956 he married his school sweetheart, Faye Haxby. Kesey attended a creative writing course taught by the novelist Wallace Stegner. His first work was an unpublished novel, ZOO, about the beatniks of the North Beach community in San Francisco. Tom Wolfe described in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) Kesey and his friends, called the Merry Pranksters, as they travelled the country and used all kinds of hallucinogens. Wolfe compared somewhat mockingly Kesey to the figures of the worlds great religions. Their bus, called Further ? actually written Furthur on