Ken Kesey was born in Colorado in 1935; he grew up in Springfield, Oregon and attended the University of Oregon. He married his high school sweetheart, Faye Haxby, while studying at the University of Oregon's School of Journalism.
In 1958, Kesey entered the creative writing program at Stanford University, where he made many of his lifelong friends. He continued to study at Stanford until 1960 and wrote a novel there, Zoo. While living in Palo Alto, Kesey worked as a night-shift aide on the psychiatric ward of the Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital; through that work and the suggestion of his neighbor, psychology grad student Vik Lovell (to whom One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is...
