![]() ![]() In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe, who had traveled with Kesey and his companions on the bus Furthur, noted that initial reviews of the book varied widely. ![]() As the nearby river slowly widens and erodes the surrounding land, all the other houses on the river have either been consumed or wrecked by the waters or been rebuilt further from the bank, except the Stamper house, which stands on a precarious peninsula struggling to maintain every inch of land with the help of an arsenal of boards, sandbags, cables, and other miscellaneous items brandished by Henry Stamper in his fight against the encroaching river. The Stamper house itself, on an isolated bank of the Wakonda Auga River, manifests the physical obstinacy of the Stamper family. This decision and its surrounding details are examined alongside the complex histories, relationships, and rivalries of the members of the Stamper family: Henry Stamper, the elderly, politically and socially conservative patriarch of the family, whose motto "Never Give a Inch!" has defined the nature of the family and its dynamic with the rest of the town Hank, the older son of Henry, whose indefatigable will and stubborn personality make him a natural leader but whose subtle insecurities threaten the stability of his family Leland, the younger son of Henry and half-brother of Hank, who as a child left Wakonda for the East Coast with his mother, but whose eccentric behavior and desire for revenge against Hank lead him back to Oregon when his mother dies and Viv, whose love for her husband Hank fades as she realizes her subordinate place in the Stamper household. The Stampers, however, own and operate a small family business independent of the unions and decide to continue working to supply the regionally owned mill with all the timber the laborers would have supplied had the strike not occurred. The union loggers in Wakonda go on strike to demand the same pay for shorter hours in response to the decreasing need for labor. The story centers on the Stamper family, a hard-headed logging clan in the coastal town of Wakonda, on the Oregon coast, in the early 1960s. ![]() The Pranksters were also habitual cannabis smokers, while several of them took amphetamines, including the group's legendary driver, Neal Cassady, the Beat Generation icon who was the inspiration for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's "On The Road." Cassady would take speed to keep him awake during marathon driving sessions, sometimes staying at the wheel for days on end, babbling incessantly to anyone who would come to sit in the passenger seat.To jump into the river an' drown Plot In this case, the word "trip" certainly serves a double meaning: Kesey supplied his cohort with copious amounts of LSD, mixed into jars of orange juice (according to The Guardian), which the Pranksters would imbibe regularly on their travels, ever widening their sense of the possibilities of a different America as they did so. ![]() Kesey had already taken LSD at the time he was writing his immense bestseller, but it was in the years following this - and the completion of his second novel, "Sometimes A Great Notion" - that he began to see psychedelic drugs as an important tool in promoting his ideas of non-conformity and societal freedom, ideas he shared with a close circle of like-minded friends.Īs explained in Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood's 2011 documentary " Magic Trip," which recounts the Merry Pranksters' journey to the 1964 World Fair in New York City using original footage filmed by the Pranksters themselves, Kesey saw the journey as a means to "open things up" in American society. Army and the CIA in 1959 that were intended to study the effects of LSD, which authorities had hoped could be used as a tool to aid interrogations, according to The New York Times. But the writer had also had his own experiences of altered perception, thanks his participation in clinical trials conducted by the U.S. Kesey had become a major literary celebrity by 1964, thanks to the instant success of his 1962 debut novel, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," the plot and characters of which were heavily indebted to his prior work as an attendant in the mental facility of Menlo Park Veteran's Hospital, near Palo Alto, California (per Biography). ![]()
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