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The Grateful Dead made its debut at one of Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests in 1965.

Raised on the outskirts of tiny Archer City, Texas, to a cattle-ranching family and educated in the California hills of Berkeley alongside Wendell Berry and Ken Kesey, McMurtry was a tangle of contradictions.

In 1975, he adapted Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” for his first film credit.

It may not have helped that Mr. Kesey denounced the adaptation.

Mid-last century, authors Aldous Huxley and Ken Kesey helped spur the use of psychedelics during the counterculture movement, and optimism brimmed among some psychologists over the drugs’ potential to augment the human psyche.