Birthdays

9-17

Birth date of William Carlos Williams, poet who wrote that "so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow/ glazed with rain water/ beside the white chickens."

Birth date of Ken Kesey, counterculture author of the 1963 novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, in which the rough and tumble protagonist Randall Patrick McMurphy takes on the establishment, or the Combine, when he battles with the Big Nurse Ratched.

Williams was a doctor who wrote his Imagist poems on scraps of paper in between patient visits. Kesey was the consummate writer, who after writing two critically received novels retreated to his Oregon farm where he wrote occasional essays and think pieces for different magazines like Rolling Stone.