Ken Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1962, based on his own experience as a part-time ward attendant at the Veteran’s Administration Hospital in Palo Alto, California. The book was originally published when Kesey was a graduate student in creative writing at Stanford University.

While at Stanford, he participated in an experiment with LSD, during which he started to hallucinate about a big Indian sweeping the floor of the ward. This gave birth to the idea of making Chief Bromden into the narrator of the book.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was widely acclaimed by critics and readers alike, but also resulted in Kesey being sued for slander. A nurse felt that one of the minor characters, a Red Cross nurse who appears in two scenes, was obviously based on her. The outcome was that Kesey was forced to rewrite parts of the text. Later, the offended nurse herself became an author and wrote a book about a health care institution. She too was charged for slander in the same way.

In 1963, Dale Wasserman, a renowned Broadway playwright, wrote a play in two acts based on Ken Kesey’s novel. The premiere took place on November 13, 1963 at the Cort Theatre in New York starring, among others, Kirk Douglas as McMurphy and Gene Wilder as Billy Bibbit.

Milos Forman made a film based on the novel in 1975, with Michael Douglas as producer. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest became one of the three films in history to be awarded the “big five” – each of the five major academy awards in any given year – best picture, best director, best actor, best actress and best script.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest takes place in a psychiatric hospital dominated by the head nurse Mildred Ratched. She is a calculating, cold and sadistic person. At the start of the story Randall Patrick McMurphy, a new patient on the ward, is transferred from a work camp for criminals as they are uncertain about his mental health. He presents himself to Dale Harding, chairman of the patient association, Billy Bibbit, Taber, Martini and Chief Bromden in such a way that makes Nurse Ratched realize that McMurphy will have a hard time adapting to the ward’s rules. This is the beginning of a power struggle between Nurse Ratched and McMurphy about why certain things must be done in a certain way.  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is not only about madness and power, but also about power madness.