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GRANTS PASS, Ore. — Ken Kesey, who railed against authority in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and orchestrated an LSD-fueled bus ride that helped immortalize the psychedelic 1960s, died Saturday two weeks after cancer surgery to remove 40 percent of his liver. He was 66. 

After studying writing at Stanford University, Kesey gained fame in 1962 with “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” followed quickly with “Sometimes a Great Notion” in 1964, then went 28 years before publishing his third major novel. 

In 1964, he rode cross-country in an old school bus named Furthur driven by Neal Cassady, hero of Jack Kerouac’s beat generation classic, “On The Road.” The passengers called themselves the Merry Pranksters and sought enlightenment through the psychedelic drug LSD. The odyssey is documented in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 account, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” 

“Sometimes a Great Notion,” widely considered Kesey’s best book, was made into a movie starring Henry Fonda and Paul Newman. 

But “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” became much more widely known because of a movie that Kesey hated. It tells the story of R.P. McMurphy, who feigned insanity to get off a prison farm. 

The 1974 movie swept the Academy Awards for best picture, best director, best actor and best actress, but Kesey sued the producers because it took the viewpoint away from the character of the schizophrenic Indian, Chief Bromden. 

Kesey continued to write short autobiographical fiction, magazine articles and children’s books, but didn’t produce another major novel until “Sailor Song” in 1992, his long-awaited Alaska book, which he described as a story of “love at the end of the world.”