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Introduction

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) is a novel written by Ken Kesey. It is set in an Oregon asylum, and serves as a study of the institutional process and the human mind. The novel was written in 1959 and published in 1962. The novel was adapted into a 1975 film, which won five Academy Awards.

Time Magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.^[1]

The story was adapted into a Broadway play by Dale Wasserman in 1963.

The book's epigraph is:

…one flew east, one flew west,
One flew over the cuckoo's nest.

These are the last two lines of a nursery rhyme.^[2]