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 PLEASANT HILL, Ore. (AP) - Before Ken Kesey wrote "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," or stocked a psychedelic school bus with LSD and the Merry Pranksters to look for America, he was a wrestler.
He might never have written "Cuckoo's Nest," the 1962 novel that launched him to stardom, if he hadn't dislocated his shoulder wrestling for the University of Oregon.
The injury kept him out of the draft, allowing him to go to Wallace Stegner's writing seminar at Stanford University, where his job at the local veterans hospital gave him the setting for "Cuckoo's Nest" and the prototype for mean Nurse Ratched.
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