[1] The story involves an Oregon family of gyppo loggers who cut trees for a local mill in opposition to unionized workers who are on strike.

The union loggers in Wakonda go on strike to demand the same pay for shorter hours in response to the decreasing need for labor.

In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe, who had traveled with Kesey and his companions on the bus Furthur, noted that initial reviews of the book varied widely.

[3] Commenting in the Saturday Review in a 1964 piece entitled "Beatnik in Lumberjack Country", critic Granville Hicks wrote: "In his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey demonstrated that he was a forceful, inventive and ambitious writer.

"[3] In his introduction to the Penguin edition, Charles Bowden called it "one of the few essential books written by an American in the last half century.