Product Description

An international bestseller and the basis for a hugely successful film, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was one of the defining works of the 1960s. Marking the fortieth anniversary of Viking's publication of this American classic, this deluxe hardcover edition includes a new introduction by Robert Faggen and drawings Kesey made when he worked at the psychiatric hospital that was the inspiration for the novel.

A mordant, wickedly subversive parable set in a mental ward, the novel chronicles the head-on collision between its hell-raising, life-affirming hero Randle Patrick McMurphy and the totalitarian rule of Big Nurse. McMurphy swaggers into the mental ward like a blast of fresh air and turns the place upside down, starting a gambling operation, smuggling in wine and women, and egging on the other patients to join him in open rebellion. But McMurphy's revolution against Big Nurse and everything she stands for quickly turns from sport to a fierce power struggle with shattering results.

With One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Kesey created a work without precedent in American literature, a novel at once comic and tragic that probes the nature of madness and sanity, authority and vitality. Greeted by unanimous acclaim when it was first published, the book has become an enduring favorite of readers. This new edition-modeled on the popular fortieth-anniversary edition of Jack Kerouac's On the Road-will bring Kesey's genius to a new generation while delighting his loyal fans.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1135732 in Books
• Published on: 1996-01-01
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.20" h x 5.03" w x 7.72" l, .99 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 608 pages

From Library Journal
Kesey's new introduction to this anniversary edition could very well be the last thing he worked on before shuffling off this mortal coil in 2001. Additionally, 25 sketches he drew while working at a mental institution in the 1950s, the inspiration for the novel, are littered throughout. Critics are divided on the meaning of the book: Is it a tale of good vs. evil, sanity over insanity, or humankind trying to overcome repression amid chaos? Whichever, it is a great read.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
The counterculture embraced this allegory of individualism versus the establishment, which, as a film, gave Jack Nicholson one of his more memorable roles. Cowed by sadistic Nurse Ratched, the inmates of a mental hospital are galvanized by a new patient, the free-spirited McMurphy, who enters a pitched battle of wills with the nurse. Narrator Tom Parker does a workmanlike, if somewhat detached, job; his tone nicely mirrors the iconoclasm in his text but doesn't quite nail the personality of the first-person narrator. Y.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Ingram
An inmate of a mental institution tries to find the freedom and independence denied him in the outside world.