Ken Kesey remembered (and Pynchon mentioned) in SFC

[pynchonoid]

Sparks fly upwards: Remembering Ken Kesey
by Jeff Forester, Special to The Chronicle 

It was the first class of Creative Writing 535 at the
University of Oregon. Ken Kesey was our instructor,
and with him, we were to compose, edit and sell a
novel in one school year. Expectations soared. I
thought my life would be changed forever, ordained,
blessed, the literary mantle bestowed by Kesey on me.

Instead of the literary fame I expected, however,
Kesey redeemed me, a salvation partially bought with
his life. Ken Kesey was the best writing instructor
I've ever had, but he taught me far more about the
cost of success, and celebrity; about how the pressure
to produce can turn art into bars that trap the
artist, about how expectation enslaves us, about how
success can become failure. Kesey knew a lot about
both expectation and success.

The publication of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,"
the novel Kesey is most famous for, in 1962, stunned
critics; the subsequent play rocked Broadway, and the
$100-million-grossing movie won a bouquet of Academy
Awards.

"Sometimes a Great Notion," in 1964, topped the
earlier effort and was perhaps the most complex novel
of modern letters; it out-Faulknered Faulkner a decade
before Thomas Pynchon's experimental monolith,
"Gravity's Rainbow." [...] 


....continues, with pix:
<http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/11/30/LVGTP3AF7O1.DTL>


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