Election Section

GRANTS PASS, Ore. — Ken Kesey, the acid-dropping Merry Prankster who wrote the 1960s novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” lay in critical condition Friday after cancer surgery on his liver. 

Kesey, 66, was operated on two weeks ago because of tumor on his liver, said his friend Ken Babbs. He said doctors had removed 40 percent of Kesey’s liver, and there were no signs of cancer elsewhere in his body. 

“He’s holding his own, but it looks like it will be a long, hard struggle,” Babbs said. 

Kesey was at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene. 

Kesey burst onto the literary scene with “Cuckoo’s Nest” in 1962, which he wrote from his experiences working at a veterans hospital. 

During the same period, Kesey volunteered for testing on LSD. After writing his second novel, “Sometimes a Great Notion,” he bought an old school bus dubbed Furthur. 

With Neal Cassady, hero of Jack Kerouac’s Beat Generation novel “On the Road,” at the wheel and pitchers of LSD-laced Kool-Aid in the cooler, Kesey and a band of friends who called themselves the Merry Pranksters took a trip across America to the New York World’s Fair. 

The bus ride was immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” 

Kesey published his third major novel, “Sailor Song” in 1992. He said he lost interest in the novel as an art form after discovering the magic of the bus. 

The movie version of “Cuckoo’s Nest” swept the 1974 Oscars for best picture, best director, best actor and best actress. But Kesey, who has never seen the film, sued the producers because it took the viewpoint away from the character of the schizophrenic Indian, Chief Bromden. 

Kesey, who was diagnosed with diabetes in 1992 and suffered a stroke in 1997, set down roots in Pleasant Hill in the mid-’60s, after serving four months in jail for a marijuana bust in California. 

His rambling red barn-house has become a landmark of the psychedelic era, drawing strangers in tie-dyed clothing, seeking enlightenment.