num_pages: 688
description: "Powerful, poetic realism...makes the tired old subject of life in a mental hospital into an absorbing Orwellian microcosm of all humanity."—Life.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. This Viking Critical Library edition is accompanied by essays, discussion topics, a chronology, and a bibliography.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 and enduring favorite of readers.
language: English
title: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: Text and Criticism
titlecomplete: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: Text and Criticism
characters: William "Billy" Bibbit, Randle Patrick McMurphy, Martini, Doctor Spivey, James "Jim" Sefelt, Scanlon, Chief Bromden, Dale Harding, Bruce Fredrickson, Charles Cheswick, Nurse Ratched
genres: Literature, American, Psychology, Classics, School, Literary Fiction, Novels, Mental Illness, Mental Health, Fiction
ratings_count: 716933
places: Salem, Oregon, Oregon, The United States of America
publisher: Penguin Books