You’re right, Ken Kesey.
Neil Cassady was Jack Kerouac’s buddy, and in Jack’s “On the Road” Dean Moriarty is based on Cassady.
It’s weird how the 50’s beat poets were the pioneers for the ‘60s. So were some other social threads that had originated in pre WWII California.
“It’s weird how the 50’s beat poets were the pioneers for the ‘60s.”
Yes, that was something that was promoted in the press. But to get some real flavor of that - there is on the YT, a Firing Line episode where Jack Kerouac and Ed Sanders and Lewis Yablonsky. Buckley starts the discussion. “Tonight we talk about” (pregnant pause) “the hippies”, as if it is a word one not ought to say in public. LOL. It’s especially funny because Buckley has that stick-up-his-ass affected accent.
Anyway, Ed Sanders starts talking about all the hippy-dippy free love shit and all that other nonsenss. Kerouac isn’t having any of it. He hated hippies!
Watch: https://youtu.be/oaBnIzY3R00?si=zjjDmzvjNE_PmVXL
Sanders was an early pioneer in leftist projection. Of all the disasters of 1968, one I’d forgotten about was the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Or was Czechoslavakia? Anyway, a brutal putdown. Buckley queries about this, doesn’t sound like Love to me, and Sanders tries to conflate it to Mayor Daley cracking heads at the ‘68 DNC in Chicago.
Sanders did write a definitive account of the Manson family, but the “Beats” didn’t care for what the Hippies were about. Yablonski was a strange cat, seems like a good guy.