Perry Lane and Ken Kesey

In the late 1950s a handful of small wooden cottages stood on a dirt lane at the edge of the Stanford golf course. They housed graduate students, writers and musicians. Within a few years the lane had produced a bestselling novel, a circle of writers who would win Pulitzers and National Book Awards and a group of friends who later called themselves the Merry Pranksters. Then the bulldozers came.

Our page on Palo Alto in the 1960s covers the wider decade. This page stays on Perry Lane itself: where it was, who lived there, what happened in its kitchens and how it ended.

Where Perry Lane was

Pinning Perry Lane to a map is harder than it sounds. Writers of the 1960s usually gave its address as Stanford or Palo Alto, because it sat next to the university's land. A 2016 Stanford Daily article describes the area as bordered by Menlo Park on two sides and the Stanford golf course on the third.

InMenlo, the Menlo Park news site, goes further. In a 2015 guide it put Kesey's house at 9 Perry Avenue and said the original houses were torn down and today's Perry Avenue occupies the site. That makes the modern street the best place to picture the old lane. A blog post on the era adds that the lanes were "just dirt drives with small signs on wooden posts."

Our page on the Stanford Golf Course notes the same neighbor from the other side of the fairways. For the town around it, see our Menlo Park guide.

Stanford's Bohemian Quarter

Tom Wolfe gave the lane its lasting nickname in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968): "Stanford's Bohemian Quarter." In the 1950s and early 1960s most of the cottages were rented by people from Stanford's creative writing program and other graduate students, along with an assortment of artists and drifters. The Stanford Daily described the scene as bohemian, outlandish and experimental.

The setting mattered. Perry Lane was close enough to campus to walk to seminars and far enough from the dry, respectable town of Palo Alto to feel like its own world. Block parties ran from about noon into the night. Local lore, repeated in a 1993 Palo Alto Weekly article, recalls a Fourth of July "Perry Lane Olympics."

Kesey arrives at Stanford

Ken Kesey was a former college wrestler from Oregon. He won a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship for 1958 to 1959, with help from the critic Leslie Fiedler. That fall he enrolled in the non-degree program at Stanford's Creative Writing Center. He and his wife, Faye, settled on Perry Lane by about 1959 and stayed for most of the next five years.

His relationship with the program was rocky.

• Wallace Stegner, the center's director, turned down his applications for a Stegner Fellowship for 1959 to 1960 and 1960 to 1961. Stegner called him "a sort of highly talented illiterate." The novelist Robert Stone said Stegner saw Kesey as a threat to intellectualism and sobriety.
• A prize anyway. Kesey won the $2,000 Harper-Saxton Prize for Zoo, a first novel that was never published.
• A seat he talked his way into. He audited the graduate writing seminar in 1960 to 1961, according to Wikipedia by falsely claiming that a colleague had approved it.
• Malcolm Cowley, the Viking Press consultant who taught that seminar in the fall, welcomed him. The Irish writer Frank O'Connor took over the next quarter and clashed with Kesey until he left the class.

Under Cowley, Kesey began drafting the book that became One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

The Perry Lane circle

Kesey's friends from those years read like a syllabus of postwar American fiction. His circle included Ken Babbs, Larry McMurtry, Wendell Berry, Ed McClanahan, Gurney Norman and Robert Stone. Not all of them lived on the lane itself. All of them passed through the Stanford writing program or its orbit. McMurtry later won a Pulitzer Prize for Lonesome Dove. Stone won a National Book Award for Dog Soldiers. Berry became one of the country's best-known essayists and poets.

The most important neighbor for Kesey's novel was Vic Lovell, a Stanford psychology graduate student. Kesey dedicated One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to him.

The Menlo Park VA experiments

Lovell told Kesey about paid volunteer studies at the Veterans Administration hospital in Menlo Park, at 795 Willow Road. Kesey signed up. The study tested hallucinogens including LSD, psilocybin and mescaline. Only later did it emerge that it was financed by the CIA's Project MKUltra. Robert Hunter, later the Grateful Dead's lyricist, also took part in experiments there, according to InMenlo.

Kesey went on to work night shifts as an aide on a psychiatric ward at the hospital. The writer Gordon Lish worked nights with him. Those shifts gave Kesey the patients, the routines and the institutional power struggles that fill the novel. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was published in 1962 and became a bestseller.

Some of what Kesey took home ended up in the kitchen. The Stanford Daily repeats the long-told story that he sometimes added LSD from the hospital to his famous chili. Treat the details as lore. The parties were real enough that they became part of the founding legend of the decade.

Music on the lane

Perry Lane parties drew musicians as well as writers. Future Grateful Dead members Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh dropped in for jam sessions, according to the Stanford Daily. The overlap between Kesey's circle and the young Palo Alto folk scene would matter in 1965, when the Grateful Dead became the house band for Kesey's Acid Tests. Our page on the Grateful Dead's Palo Alto roots follows that thread. Many of the same young people spent their afternoons at Kepler's Books in Menlo Park.

The end of Perry Lane

In August 1963 the Perry Lane cottages were torn down. Kesey, flush with money from his novel, moved about 15 miles southwest to a log house in La Honda in the Santa Cruz Mountains. There he hosted the gatherings that grew into the Merry Pranksters. Sometimes a Great Notion, his second novel, came out in 1964. That summer the Pranksters crossed the country in a painted school bus. In 1965 and 1966 they staged the Acid Tests around the Bay Area.

• 1958: Kesey arrives at Stanford on a Woodrow Wilson fellowship.
• About 1959: Ken and Faye Kesey move to Perry Lane.
• 1960: Kesey begins Cuckoo's Nest in Malcolm Cowley's seminar.
• 1962: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is published.
• August 1963: The Perry Lane cottages are demolished. Kesey moves to La Honda.
• 1964: Sometimes a Great Notion is published. The Pranksters' bus trip follows.
• 1968: Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test makes Perry Lane famous.

Seeing the setting today

Nothing on the street marks its history. The Stanford Daily reported in 2016 that only a handful of the original wooden cottages remained in the wider area. Most of the old lane is now ordinary houses. If you go, treat it as a residential street and keep your visit brief and quiet.

The VA hospital on Willow Road is still a working medical campus, not a museum. The best way to feel the era is to pair a drive past the golf course with a stop at Kepler's and a walk along Santa Cruz Avenue in Menlo Park, where the Warlocks played their first shows in 1965. For the university side of the same story, see our history of Stanford.

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