In 1959, Ken Kesey, then a creative writing student at Stanford University, volunteered to act as a guinea pig in a series of medical trials, partly sponsored by the CIA, into the effects of psychoactive drugs like LSD and mescaline. The experiences he had during these trials fed into the novel he was writing and the result was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Set in a mental hospital in Oregon, the book is narrated by "Chief" Bromden, a giant American Indian patient there. It tells the story of what happens too the other inmates of the hospital when the drugged routine of their lives is disrupted by the arrivale of Randle McMurphy, a larger-than-life prankster who challenges all the rules and assumptions of the establishment.

Apart from his fiction—other novels include Sometimes a Great Nation and Sailor Song—Kesey is also known as the leader of the "Merry Pranksters," the group of proto-hippies who, in the summer of 1964, drove across America in a psychedelically painted school bus, startling the natives of the small towns en route with their appearance and antics. Throughout his life—and in all his writings—Kesey’s aim was to startle. Just as Randle McMurphy strove to awaken his fellow inmates to the world outside the hospitcal, his creator wanted to stimulate people into the new wasy of looking at life and its potential.

Review reprinted from 100 Must Read Life-Changing Books, by Nick Rennison (A&C Black Books, ISBN 9780713688726). Available in bookstores everywhere.

For nearly 2,000 years The Epic of Gilgamesh was considered the greatest poem ever written. It told of the mighty king Gilgamesh, who, grieving over the death of his friend Enkidu, tried to find immortality. This was a story of the power of love, the inscrutability of the gods and the ultimate fate of all men hero, king or peasant. The tale was respected by kings and studied by priests, until it vanished, forgotten beneath dust and stone as ancient Mesopotamia crumbled into history. For another 2,000 years, not even the name Gilgamesh raised the ghost of a memory. The king who sought immortality had apparently lost the struggle.

Then in 1872, amateur linguist George Smith, working for the British Museum, began to translate ancient tablets from the ruins of Nineveh. Smith thought he had stumbled on an account of the Biblical flood, but soon he unearthed the tale of a hero we now know as Gilgamesh the king who was dead and lost lived again. The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh is David Damrosch’s account of the discovery, preservation and translation of this remarkable poem, tracing both the history of the epic and archaeology itself. Like the epic, Damrosch’s book offers tales of dangerous journeys, heroic struggles and tragic defeats. Sometimes the battles are as grand as the clash of East and West, sometimes as petty as scholarly jealousy, yet always the story is compelling and fascinating.

Damrosch treats his subject with both excellent scholarship and a deft hand; he has a gift for telling the human side of events, revealing the characters behind the names and dates of history. The Buried Book is equally fast-moving and fascinating, offering insights not only into the distant past, but also the very immediate conflicts of today. Kings, emperors, scholars, poets even dictator Saddam Hussein all share a part in the story of Gilgamesh a fitting taste of immortality for a once forgotten king.

Howard Shirley is a writer in Franklin, Tennessee.

Almost a full decade before the American Civil War, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, helped generate the national debate over abolition. The story of Tom, a Kentucky slave who struggles to keep his family together, and the evil he encounters at the hands of white men like plantation owner Simon Legree, the novel initially appeared as a serial in the magazine National Era. Published in book form in 1852, it became one of the top-selling titles in the world in the 19th century. In recent years Stowe has been blamed for introducing to our culture, however unintentionally, some incredibly durable racial stereotypes the acquiescent Uncle Tom; the boisterous pickaninny and the criticism has overshadowed her novel’s many merits. Working to restore the book’s reputation, author Henry Louis Gates Jr. and scholar Hollis Robbins have collaborated on The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which should reaffirm the narrative’s place in the American literary canon. Using solid scholarship to provide an affectionate yet balanced evaluation of the work, Gates and Robbins co-wrote the notes and introduction of this lavish new edition. Featuring reproductions of original illustrations, their text is likely to become the final word on Stowe’s groundbreaking book.

Like Mark Twain, I have a whole library of books not by Jane Austen. Though my knuckleheadedness in not being able to appreciate Ms. Austen is as incurable as it is inexcusable, I can appreciate the fanatical devotion of her admirers, because I feel almost the same way about Dawn Powell.

Just as the Janeites cannot understand why everyone doesn’t fall under the spell of their adored one, so do I find it unfathomable that a Dawn Powell novel is not in the hands of every literate person in the country. Alas, the truth is that the coterie of Dawnites remains fairly small, despite periodic attempts to boost her.

The latest noble effort is by the Library of America, which has brought out a two-volume collection of her novels under the supervision of Tim Page, Powell’s biographer and editor of her collected letters. The two new volumes are Dawn Powell: Novels 1930-1942 and Dawn Powell: Novels 1944-1962, each $35. Anyone seeking to discover one of the most twinkling wits and deftest satirists of 20th century America can find her here.

They will also discover one of the keenest chroniclers of Midwestern small-town life, because Powell’s 15 novels (nine of which are included here) fall into two camps: Those set in Ohio (Powell’s native state) in the early 20th century, and those set in the sophisticated Manhattan world of artists, writers and actors from the 1930s through the 1950s. Both are autobiographical, the former more heavily so.

While the Manhattan novels are unquestionably wittier urban pretensions and disputes seem to offer readier targets than rural the Ohio novels are far from being simple accounts of grim life on the late Middle Border. The human comedy is no less comical among the bumpkins than among the glitterati.

For instance, in My Home Is Far Away, probably the most directly autobiographical of all, the mother in a family dies, and three young girls are left to the untender mercies of their feckless father, a blustery, hail-fellow-well-met type who believes possessions can cure any woe, though he has neither possessions nor the gumption to acquire them.

The girls are bounced from pillar to post, from relative to relative, including their grandma, whose nurturing is less than fussy. Grandma has a brother, Wally, whose daughters and sons refused to take him in because, they claimed, he had turned Unitarian in his travels. Later, when one of the daughters breaks down and takes him in, she makes him sleep in the barn, where after not showing up for meals for a couple of days he is found dead, and the horses wouldn’t touch the hay for days. When Midwestern provincials get to New York which journey, Edmund Wilson wrote, is Powell’s essential theme they (and we) find life no less piquant. Angels on Toast is my favorite of the Manhattan novels, but A Time to Be Born is worth a special look because of the way in which characters can be traced to real personages familiar to Powell.

Like Angels, A Time to Be Born concerns a set of characters who use, and scramble over, each other to achieve their ends in life and love. It employs a catalog opening, a trademark of Powell’s, in which she lists happenings, trends, things in the air, to set the scene.

The story line, too, is standard Powell, and in its basics is nothing more than feuding and fussing over men or, in a word, sex. (Compared to Powell women, Powell men seem more passive than predatory, though they rarely pass up goods on offer.) Men and women want women and men who want other men and women a constant mismatching, until everyone begins to wonder if his or her original choice was wrong.

The chief predatory female is Amanda Keeler Evans, supposedly based on Clare Boothe Luce, who uses her ruthless but somewhat dopey husband, a publishing magnate, to further her career. As in other Powell novels, other characters have real-life models, such as Andrew Callingham, a Hemingway figure.

In My Home, the girls’ grandpa, an enthusiastic if undiscriminating reader, says, If books was anything like real life nobody’d want to waste time reading ’em. I’m afraid Powell is using grandpa to pull our leg. There’s no time wasted in reading these and other highly lifelike novels collected here: Dance Night; Come Back to Sorrento; Turn, Magic Wheel; The Locusts Have No King; The Wicked Pavilion and The Golden Spur.

Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer in Wisconsin.

Like Mark Twain, I have a whole library of books not by Jane Austen. Though my knuckleheadedness in not being able to appreciate Ms. Austen is as incurable as it is inexcusable, I can appreciate the fanatical devotion of her admirers, because I feel almost the same way about Dawn Powell.

Just as the Janeites cannot understand why everyone doesn’t fall under the spell of their adored one, so do I find it unfathomable that a Dawn Powell novel is not in the hands of every literate person in the country. Alas, the truth is that the coterie of Dawnites remains fairly small, despite periodic attempts to boost her.

The latest noble effort is by the Library of America, which has brought out a two-volume collection of her novels under the supervision of Tim Page, Powell’s biographer and editor of her collected letters. The two new volumes are Dawn Powell: Novels 1930-1942 and Dawn Powell: Novels 1944-1962, each $35. Anyone seeking to discover one of the most twinkling wits and deftest satirists of 20th century America can find her here.

They will also discover one of the keenest chroniclers of Midwestern small-town life, because Powell’s 15 novels (nine of which are included here) fall into two camps: Those set in Ohio (Powell’s native state) in the early 20th century, and those set in the sophisticated Manhattan world of artists, writers and actors from the 1930s through the 1950s. Both are autobiographical, the former more heavily so.

While the Manhattan novels are unquestionably wittier urban pretensions and disputes seem to offer readier targets than rural the Ohio novels are far from being simple accounts of grim life on the late Middle Border. The human comedy is no less comical among the bumpkins than among the glitterati.

For instance, in My Home Is Far Away, probably the most directly autobiographical of all, the mother in a family dies, and three young girls are left to the untender mercies of their feckless father, a blustery, hail-fellow-well-met type who believes possessions can cure any woe, though he has neither possessions nor the gumption to acquire them.

The girls are bounced from pillar to post, from relative to relative, including their grandma, whose nurturing is less than fussy. Grandma has a brother, Wally, whose daughters and sons refused to take him in because, they claimed, he had turned Unitarian in his travels. Later, when one of the daughters breaks down and takes him in, she makes him sleep in the barn, where after not showing up for meals for a couple of days he is found dead, and the horses wouldn’t touch the hay for days. When Midwestern provincials get to New York which journey, Edmund Wilson wrote, is Powell’s essential theme they (and we) find life no less piquant. Angels on Toast is my favorite of the Manhattan novels, but A Time to Be Born is worth a special look because of the way in which characters can be traced to real personages familiar to Powell.

Like Angels, A Time to Be Born concerns a set of characters who use, and scramble over, each other to achieve their ends in life and love. It employs a catalog opening, a trademark of Powell’s, in which she lists happenings, trends, things in the air, to set the scene.

The story line, too, is standard Powell, and in its basics is nothing more than feuding and fussing over men or, in a word, sex. (Compared to Powell women, Powell men seem more passive than predatory, though they rarely pass up goods on offer.) Men and women want women and men who want other men and women a constant mismatching, until everyone begins to wonder if his or her original choice was wrong.

The chief predatory female is Amanda Keeler Evans, supposedly based on Clare Boothe Luce, who uses her ruthless but somewhat dopey husband, a publishing magnate, to further her career. As in other Powell novels, other characters have real-life models, such as Andrew Callingham, a Hemingway figure.

In My Home, the girls’ grandpa, an enthusiastic if undiscriminating reader, says, If books was anything like real life nobody’d want to waste time reading ’em. I’m afraid Powell is using grandpa to pull our leg. There’s no time wasted in reading these and other highly lifelike novels collected here: Dance Night; Come Back to Sorrento; Turn, Magic Wheel; The Locusts Have No King; The Wicked Pavilion and The Golden Spur.

Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer in Wisconsin.

I guess Mark Twain was right in 1897 when he told a London correspondent of the New York Journal, The report of my death was an exaggeration. He’s back at least in the form of a short story stretched by the publishers to fit the dimensions of a novella. The story is not the best of Twain, but even mediocre Twain (as long as it’s not Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc) is plenty of fun and worth reading. Besides, the foreword and afterword by Roy Blount Jr. is good enough for the $16.95 admission price.

The story behind A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage, certainly more interesting than the book itself, goes something like this: During a visit by William Dean Howells, longtime editor at The Atlantic and steadfast friend of Sam Clemens, to Twain’s home in Hartford, an evening of friendly conversation and cigar smoking turned (as it often would with Twain) entrepreneurial. Twain proposed he write a skeleton plot and that 12 famous authors of the time write up a story, using the same plot, blindfolded’ as to what the others had written. Howells went along with the idea, but rightly called it a scheme in a letter he wrote trying to convince another novelist, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, to join the party. Twain expected Bret Harte, Charles Dudley Warner and Oliver Wendell Holmes to participate. Warner and Harte maybe, but who can imagine Holmes in such a project? Or more inconceivable, Henry James? Roy Blount Jr. says it best and most succinctly in his afterword: Of all the gang that Twain hoped to enlist in his project, the most unlikely was Henry James. Can any sane person, we may ask, have expected to get Henry James’ juices flowing with a plot abounding in bumpkins, spleen, assault, and battery? And, basically, that’s what the story is, a parable moving toward a punchline. I won’t ruin the ending for anyone, because there is a mystery of sorts. It has to do with Jules Verne, whom Twain clearly did not like. But I may have said too much already. Suffice it to say that a young man is found by a Missouri farmer out in the middle of a field. The young man is dressed like an aristocrat, lying full-length in the snow, no footprints around him and speaking French. There’s also a girl in this tale, of course, a beautiful one, and a handsome and gentle-spirited young man who is in love with her. In addition, there’s a greedy father and a mean-hearted uncle. We end up where we’d expect to be with such ingredients except for the dash of Jules Verne, that is.

Not a plot, certainly, for Henry James. But one, Blount argues in his afterword, for Twain, especially the Twain who was stuck in the middle of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. According to Blount, this story shows the darker vision of Twain emerging, his newfound politics evolving. As Blount sees it, He began to acknowledge that the roots of his innocence were in a village corrupted by slavery. In the second half of Huckleberry Finn good-natured people are abused over and over again by meanness, callousness, and violence. A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage is worth reading for the simple pleasures it gives, but perhaps more interesting for the complex working of Twain’s mind that it suggests at a time when his most famous character, a white boy with a sound heart and a deformed conscience, was floating down the river with a black man and into territory that no American writer had fully explored before.

Michael Pearson directs the creative writing program at Old Dominion University.