Kesey, Ken.

One flew over the cuckoo's nest / Ken Kesey ; with illustrations and a new introduction by the author ; text introduction by Robert Faggen. - 40th anniversary edition - New York : Viking, 2002. - xxiv, 281 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

"In the early 1960s, fresh out of Stanford's creative writing program, Ken Kesey supported himself by working as an attendant at a psychiatric hospital. It was there that he wrote what became his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which Viking released on February 1, 1962. This hardcover edition, which includes new introductions and more than twenty-five line drawings that Kesey made while composing the novel, commemorates the fortieth anniversary of the publication of this American classic." "Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, this 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. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the awesome power of the Combine. Hailed upon its publication as "a glittering parable of good and evil" (The New York Times Book Review) and "a roar of protest against middlebrow society's Rules and the invisible Rulers who enforce them" (Time), this powerful book is as bracing and insightful today as it was in the 1960s."--BOOK JACKET.

0670030589 (alk. paper)


Mentally ill--Fiction.
Psychiatric hospital patients--Fiction.
General fiction.
Psychiatric hospitals--Fiction.