When One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was published in 1962, America was poised between buttoned-up postwar conformity and the rumblings of cultural revolt. Ken Kesey, just 27 years old and fresh from a government-sponsored drug trial, cracked the social facade wide open with this startling debut. Over six decades later, the novel still stings. It’s not just a story about a psychiatric hospital—it’s about the machinery of control and the high cost of resistance. Set in an Oregon mental institution, Cuckoo’s Nest tells the story of Randle P. McMurphy, a swaggering, red-headed gambler and brawler who lands himself in…
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Kesey’s Classic Still Shocks and Startles
Reading the novel today, one is struck by how Kesey anticipated anxieties that would erupt later in the 1960s: distrust of institutions, the criminalization of nonconformity, the blurring of sanity and social conditioning.
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