From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Kenneth Elton "Ken" Kesey (September 17, 1935 – November 10, 2001) was an American author, best known for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), and as a counter-cultural figure who considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. "I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie," Kesey said in a 1999 interview with Robert K. Elder. Description above from the Wikipedia article Ken Kesey, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.