Kenneth Elton Kesey (September 17, 1935 - November 10, 2001) was an American author, best known for his debut novel , One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and as a counter-cultural figure who, some consider, was a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. "I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie," Kesey said in a 1999 interview with Robert K. Elder.