Synopses & Reviews
An international bestseller and the basis for a hugely successful film, Ken Kesey's
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was one of the defining works of the 1960s.
A mordant, wickedly subversive parable set in a mental ward, the novel chronicles the head-on collision between its hell-raising, life-affirming hero Randle Patrick McMurphy and the totalitarian rule of Big Nurse. McMurphy swaggers into the mental ward like a blast of fresh air and turns the place upside down, starting a gambling operation, smuggling in wine and women, and egging on the other patients to join him in open rebellion. But McMurphy's revolution against Big Nurse and everything she stands for quickly turns from sport to a fierce power struggle with shattering results.
With One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Kesey created a work without precedent in American literature, a novel at once comic and tragic that probes the nature of madness and sanity, authority and vitality. Greeted by unanimous acclaim when it was first published, the book has become an enduring favorite of readers.
Review:
"A glittering parable of good and evil." The New York Times Book Review
Review:
"This is an allegory with a difference, the difference being found in the very method of composition, in the bi-tonal technique of terrible realism in conjunction with a profound and searching parable of government and the governed." Richard A. Jelliffe, Chicago Tribune (1962)
Review:
"[A]s a work of fiction, for background, for story, for strong writing that holds harsh humor, anger and compassion, and, most of all, for the creation of Randle P. McMurphy, this is a first novel of special worth."Rose Feld, New York Herald Tribune (1962)
Review:
"A work of genuine literary merit. What Mr. Kesey has done in his unusual novel is to transform the plight of a ward of inmates in a mental institution into a glittering parable of good and evil." Martin Levin, New York Times Book Review (1962)
Review:
"[Kesey's] book is a strong, warm story about the nature of human good and evil....[A] roar of protest against middlebrow society's Rule and the invisible Rulers who enforce them." Time (19620)
Review:
"Powerful, poetic realism...makes the tired old subject of life in a mental hospital into an absorbing Orwellian microcosm of all humanity." Life
Review:
"Mr. Kesey has created a world that is convincing, alive, and glowing within its own boundaries....His is a large, robust talent, and he has written a large, robust book." Saturday Review
Synopsis:
Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Kesey's work is the seminal novel of the 1960s that has left an indelible mark on literature. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her.
About the Author
Ken Kesey (1935-2001) was raised in Oregon, graduated from the University of Oregon, and later studied at Stanford University. He was the author of four novels, two children's books, and several works of nonfiction.
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