One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: (Penguin Orange Collection)

by Ken Kesey

Overview

The inspiration for the new Netflix original series Ratched

Part of the Penguin Orange Collection, a limited-run series of twelve influential and beloved American classics in a bold series design offering a modern take on the iconic Penguin paperback

Winner of the 2016 AIGA + Design Observer 50 Books | 50 Covers competition
 
For the seventieth anniversary of Penguin Classics, the Penguin Orange Collection celebrates the heritage of Penguin’s iconic book design with twelve influential American literary classics representing the breadth and diversity of the Penguin Classics library. These collectible editions are dressed in the iconic orange and white tri-band cover design, first created in 1935, while french flaps, high-quality paper, and striking cover illustrations provide the cutting-edge design treatment that is the signature of Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions today.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
 
Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a seminal novel of the 1960s. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants—a counterculture classic that inspired the 1975 film adaptation, widely considered one of the greatest movies ever made.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143129516
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/18/2016
Series:	Penguin Orange Collection
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	8,820
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.90(d)
Lexile:	1040L (what's this?)

About the Author

Ken Kesey (1935–2001) graduated from the University of Oregon and later studied at Stanford with Wallace Stegner, Malcolm Cowley, Richard Scowcroft, and Frank O’Connor. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, his first novel, was published in 1962. His second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, followed in 1964. His other books include Kesey’s Garage Sale, Demon Box, Caverns (with O. U. Levon), The Further Inquiry, Sailor Song, and Last Go Round (with Ken Babbs). His two children’s books are Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear and The Sea Lion.

Read an Excerpt

Sketches

Psychedelic sixties. God knows whatever that means it certainly meant far more than drugs, though drugs still work as a pretty good handle to the phenomena.
Eight o'clock every Tuesday morning I showed up at the vet's hospital in Menlo Park, ready to roll. The doctor deposited me in a little room on his ward, dealt me a couple of pills or a shot or a little glass of bitter juice, then locked the door. He checked back every forty minutes to see if I was still alive, took some tests, asked some questions, left again. The rest of the time I spent studying the inside of my forehead, or looking out the little window in the door. It was six inches wide and eight inches high, and it had heavy chicken wire inside the glass.

You get your visions through whatever gate you're granted.

Patients straggled by in the hall outside, their faces all ghastly confessions. Sometimes I looked at them and sometimes they looked at me. but rarely did we look at one another. It was too naked and painful. More was revealed in a human face than a human being can bear, face-to-face.

Sometimes the nurse came by and checked on me. Her face was different. It was painful business, but not naked. This was not a person you could allow yourself to be naked in front of.

Six months or so later I had finished the drug experiments and applied for a job. I was taken on as a nurse's aide, in the same ward, with the same doctor, under the same nurse—and you must understand we're talking about a huge hospital here! It was weird.

But, as I said, it was the sixties.

Those faces were still there, still painfully naked. To ward them off my case I very prudently took to carrying around a little notebook, to scribble notes. I got a lot of compliments from nurses: "Good for you, Mr. Kesey. That's the spirit. Get to know these men."

I also scribbled faces. No, that's not correct. As I prowl through this stack of sketches I can see that these faces bored their way behind my forehead and scribbled themselves. I just held the pen and waited for the magic to happen.

This was, after all, the sixties.

Ken Kesey

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Ken Kesey.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

"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 hospital into a glittering parable of good and evil."
—The New York Times Book Review

"[A] brilliant first novel . . . a strong, warm story about the nature of human good and evil . . . Keysey has made his book a roar of protest against middlebrow society's Rules and the invisible Rulers who enforce them."
—Time

"The final triumph of these men at the cost of a terrifying sacrifice should send chills down any reader's back. . . . This novel's scenes have the liveliness of a motion picture."
—The Washington Post

"An outstanding book . . . [Kesey's] characters are original and real. . . . This is a tirade against the increasing controls over man and his mind, yet the author never gets on a soap box. Nor does he forget that there is a thin line between tragedy and comedy."
—Houston Chronicle 

From the Publisher

09/13/2024

Gr 9 Up—Con man Randall P. McMurphy, convicted of drunkenness, assault, and battery, pulls a fast one when he requests a transfer to the men's ward of a mental hospital to get out of the hard labor of a work farm. A ward of scared men is in thrall to the powerful, unflappable Nurse Ratched. McMurphy, charismatic and selfish, challenges her authority when a desire to make the men laugh—something, he's observed, they never do—turns him into a person who cares about others. He relies on his own definition of manhood to reach them; whether he succeeds is for readers to decide. Kesey's novel of life in a hospital for the mentally ill is a document of the 1960s. Its anti-institutionalism and celebration of boisterous rebellion against a seemingly rational (but unnecessarily repressive) establishment spoke to a generation of activists. The novel raises crucial questions about power and control, about how groups establish and maintain the kind of order that they deem necessary to their survival. While it includes disturbing and mature themes and experiences, and has clearly outdated stereotypes embedded within, it can be profitably taught to high school students to open stimulating and illuminating classroom discussions. VERDICT Through humor and his brand of heroism, Kesey reveals the mistreatment and ostracism of the mentally ill who society would have preferred to remain forgotten. A must for all collections.—Georgia Christgau & NCTE Database

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