Who Were the Merry Pranksters?
The seeds of the 1960s counterculture movement were planted during the 1940s and 1950s by the so-called Beat Generation. Poets and writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg defied mainstream society by publishing jazz-influenced works, often laced with drug references and obscene language. During the late 1950s, author Ken Kesey and several of his friends living in a Bohemian section of Stanford, California formed a loose alliance called the Merry Pranksters. The original Merry Pranksters patterned their lifestyles after the New York-based beatnik culture, especially the On the Road experiences of Jack Kerouac. Around 1960, Ken Kesey volunteered for a series of medical experiments involving various psychedelic drugs, such as mescaline, peyote, morning glory seeds and most significantly, LSD. Kesey smuggled many of these substances back to the other Merry Pranksters, who later discovered legal methods for importing peyote from Mexico. Meanwhile, Kesey himself became a successful n
