"The Unsettlers" : Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters, and the Myth of the Frontier in the American counterculture.
Date
1998
Authors
Ainsley, Martin James
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Abstract
This thesis examines the intersecting roles of the American Myth of the Frontier and of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in the counterculture of 1960s America to make two connected arguments. Firstly, it argues generally that the Frontier Myth accounts significant! y for the peculiar character and trajectory of the American counterculture.
Secondly, it argues specifically that the experiments of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters from the early- to mid-1960s comprised a primary instance of the means by which the American counterculture creatively adapted the Myth of the Frontier to its purposes. Analyzing the Pranksters within the context of the Frontier Myth provides us with a convincing, if incomplete, explanation for why the American counterculture seemed to emerge, flourish and self-destruct so dramatically within such a short period of time.