One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

by Ken Kesey

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: Genre 1 key example

Genre
Explanation and Analysis:

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a social novel or protest novel. Like Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel, The Jungle, or Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Kesey's novel aims primarily to expose and critique injustice. The main issue it explores is American society's treatment of mental illness. Kesey spent time working at a veterans' hospital and saw firsthand the indignity with which traumatized veterans were treated by the institutions that were supposed to help them. He writes his characters to represent an experience that had long gone ignored by mainstream culture.