Acid Christ Gestalt, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey Era, Clyde Keller Photo

ABOUT THE NEW BOOK, NOW IN BOOKSTORES


Acid Christ: Ken Kesey, LSD, and the Politics of Ecstasy
Mark Christensen 

Cover photo and interior photos by Clyde Keller


When Ken Kesey burst on the literary scene in 1962 with his groundbreaking novel, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, and scarcely two years later followed this feat with SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION, his literary future seemed assured. A self-described "Okie" and campus jock—a wrestling champion at the University of Oregon––Kesey had risen to the ranks of Norman Mailer, John Updike and Truman Capote as a literary wunderkind. However, despite such an auspicious beginning, he opted instead to jump off the literary bandwagon in favor of a magic bus: accompanied by his Merry Pranksters, he set off on the free-wheeling drug-induced cross country road trip, that was to become the iconic journey chronicled in the bestselling ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST by Tom Wolfe. Virtually overnight, Ken Kesey traded away a promising literary future to reinvent himself from man of letters to psychedelic superman—a hedonistic guru of the 60’s, spokesman and poster boy for the flower-power generation who devotedly embraced a freak-freely philosophy as exemplified by their call to arms: "Turn on, tune in, drop out."

Now, through incisive research and personal interviews with sources ranging from former frat-house college buddies to friends, cohorts and acolytes, Mark Christensen portrays "The Commander" as a far more complex figure than the hippie cheerleader and media darling of the psychedelic era. We discover instead a conflicted and contradictory figure who became the Pied Piper to a generation of young seekers ten years younger than he, and preached of free love and peace-loving idealism, despite his down-home traditionalism and rigidly conservative viewpoint. Christensen, who was inspired at an early age by Kesey’s literary genius, writes of how he was "awed by his talents, awed more by how he had abandoned many of them, and fascinated by the evolution of his legend. As "King of the Counterculture’ Kesey became key to guiding if not creating one of the greatest mass movements in contemporary history."

Within the context of the Ken Kesey story, journalist and author Mark Christensen, who "grew up around the Kesey Chautauqua," skillfully weaves his own personal vignettes to forge an exhilarating blend of biography and memoir, candidly and at times hilariously portraying himself as one of the flock who followed the edicts of his paisley-ed hero; Christensen’s personal and professional trajectory runs parallel and at times converges with that of Kesey and his followers, and the result is a sheep’s eye view of the shepherd that is revealing, tragic, and ruefully honest. As much a multi-dimensional portrait of Kesey himself, when viewed through the kaleidoscope of Christensen’s personal narrative, ACID CHRIST: Ken Kesey, LSD and the Politics of Ecstasy provides a panoramic view of a generation.