Where Are They Buried? (54 page)

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Turn in at the main gate before the church, bear left at the “Y” and take the next left onto Crane Way. Surrounded by hedges, 100 yards on the right is the Irving plot.

SEPTEMBER 17, 1935 – NOVEMBER 10, 2001

Ken Kesey was raised in a religious fire-and-brimstone household, in high school was an Oregon champion wrestler and voted “Most Likely to Succeed,” and upon graduation married his high-school sweetheart. While Ken studied for a Speech and Communications degree at Stanford University, he worked to support his family, which had suddenly developed into a three-baby affair, yet he still managed to impress the faculty so that he was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to pursue his writing interests.

While at Stanford, though, Ken’s progress toward Young Republican of the Month changed course after he participated in experiments in the psychology department to earn extra money. The studies included the ingestion of chemicals, and the chemicals included lysergic acid diethylamide or, more commonly, LSD. The acid experiences certainly had an effect on Ken, well beyond any temporary color-hearing or psychedelic, out-of-body experience. His life’s focus was altered, and though
he never strayed too far from his familial responsibilities, Ken’s crowd of friends shifted and he tuned in to the burgeoning San Francisco scene.

Around this time, Ken was also working as an orderly in the psychiatric ward of the Menlo Park Veteran’s Administration hospital. In 1962 he released his first novel, which clearly showed the influences of his experiences, the critically popular and successful
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. In 1974 Ken would sell its movie rights for just $5,000, and a film version would sweep the Academy Awards. In 1964, his
Sometimes a Great Notion
was published and, though it was well received, the book never approached
Cuckoo
’s success.

As the 1960s blossomed, Ken was at the forefront of the counterculture. He threw “acid test” parties around Palo Alto’s bohemian community and became a patron of a local band called the Warlocks, later known as the Grateful Dead. In 1964 his band of proto-hippie friends, dubbed “the Merry Pranksters,” loaded onto an LSD-fueled, Day-Glo colored school bus nicknamed “Furthur” and, with Neal Cassady at the wheel (the real-life Dean Moriarty of Jack Kerouac’s
On The Road
), Ken orchestrated the ultimate cross-country road trip. The journey immortalized the psychedelic sixties and was later chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
.

After a short jail term on marijuana charges in 1965, Ken moved to Oregon. He raised beef cattle, served on the school board, and coached high-school wrestling while Furthur rusted away in a boggy pasture. Though he continued to write short fiction and the occasional magazine article, he found that it had become harder to write since he became famous. “Fame isn’t good for a writer. You don’t observe well when you’re being observed,” he said. His last major novel,
Sailor Song
, was published in 1992.

Before undergoing surgery for a spot of cancer on his liver, Ken sensed the end was at hand and penned a goodbye note to his fans that was released after his passing. Closing the message, he wrote, “Meanwhile, I’ve still lots of forms to fill out and they’re looking for a bigger halo but durned if I’m going to play that harp. I’m holding out for the thunder machine. See you around. Kesey.”

At 66, Ken died of complications after the surgery. After a public memorial service in Eugene, his tie-dyed coffin was brought back to his Pleasant Hill estate and, there on the privacy of his farm, Ken was buried next to his son Jed, who’d perished in a 1984 van crash. There are no visiting hours.

MARCH 22, 1908 – JUNE 10, 1988

In 1923 the LaMoore family was uprooted from its native North Dakota after a series of bank crises and, over the next 25 years, Louis wandered the world over. He skinned cattle in west Texas, sailed the world’s seas as a merchant seaman, lumberjacked the great Northwest forests, hobo’d to New Orleans, biked across India, mined for silver in Nevada and, after attending Tank Destroyer school, commanded a platoon of fuel-supply vehicles in Europe during World War II. As if that weren’t enough, during many of those years Louis complemented his erratic income by boxing on professional fight cards.

After the war, he concentrated on writing and nearly starved as he struggled to find a suitable genre, moving from adventure tales to detective yarns to sports stories. In 1950 Louis was hired to write Hopalong Cassidy novels as Tex Burns and there, in the sage brush and box canyons, he found his home as a writer of Westerns. In 1952 Louis pitched his
Gift of Cochise
short story to Bantam Books and, though they were not enamored of his new surname (spelled as “L’Amour,” which insinuated it’d be a “Western written in lipstick”), Louis was signed to a long-term contract. The next year
Gift of Cochise
was made into the feature film
Hondo
, starring John Wayne, and Louis’ career skyrocketed.

Over the next three decades his historically accurate novels sold an astounding 200 million copies, confounding critics who denounced his work as pulp fodder with haphazard composition and stilted dialogue. Meanwhile, Louis remained unapologetic for any shortcomings, maintaining shortly before his death that, “I don’t give a damn what anyone else thinks. I know it’s literature and I know it’ll be read a hundred years from now.” Indeed, he’s on track—in the fifteen years after his passing, another 60 million L’Amour sagas sold.

After being diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, Louis began his long-postponed memoir,
Education of a Wandering Man
, and was editing the book the afternoon that he died.

At 80, he was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From Highway 2, take the San Fernando Road exit and turn northwest. After a mile, make a right onto Glendale Avenue and the park’s entrance is immediately on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Get a map at the information booth and make your way to the Great Mausoleum. But don’t go inside—Louis is buried outside near the mausoleum’s Memorial Terrace entrance. His grave is against the wall on the right, just beside the white statue of Jesus Christ seated with children.

JANUARY 12, 1876 – NOVEMBER 22, 1916

Jack London dropped out of Berkeley to join the Alaskan Klondike gold rush in 1897, and of his brutal experiences there, and later at sea, he wrote vigorous tales of men and animals at odds with one another. Upon his return to San Francisco the following year, he published his first collection of stories,
The Son of the Wolf
, but it was his next adventure story,
The Call of the Wild
, in 1903, that turned him into the most successful and best-known writer in America in the early 1900s.

Over the remainder of his life, Jack wrote another 45 books of fiction and nonfiction. Most of his work was in the adventure genre, but he occasionally strayed, most notably in the philosophical and politically tinged
The Sea Wolf
, and
The People of the Abyss
.

Always a heavy drinker, Jack probably died of physical ailments related to alcoholism, but some scholars believe he committed suicide.

In any event, after his death at 40, he was buried on the grounds of his estate, which is now the Jack London State Historical Park, in Glen Ellen, California.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
The park is located just a few miles north of Sonoma and is signed from Route 12. Though you can get a map at the park ranger’s booth and use it to find Jack’s grave easily, directions are also included here so you may visit Jack when the park isn’t open, if you wish. After the ranger’s booth, turn left and park in the lot. On the right, just beyond the gate marking the lot’s entrance, is a service road that is closed to vehicles. Walk about 500 yards down that road and you’ll come to a small field. On the left of the field is a path, which, after another 100 yards, ends at Jack’s grave.

JANUARY 21, 1923 – NOVEMBER 10, 2007

Norman Mailer never wrote the great American novel, but he proved himself a great American writer who provoked,
thrilled, and enraged his readers. After bursting onto the literary stage at 25 with
The Naked and the Dead
, a best-seller based on his experiences as a Harvard-educated sergeant during World War II, his thick lifetime catalog of fiction zigzagged across genres.
The Gospel According to the Son
was an unauthorized “autobiography” of Jesus,
The Castle in the Forest
imagined Adolf Hitler as a boy—featuring narration by the devil,
The Executioner’s Song
about murderer Gary Gilmore blurred the lines between literature and journalism in a style pioneered by Capote, while what started as spare notes of personal observations about his participation in a 1967 march on the Pentagon by anti-war activists evolved into
The Armies of the Night
, a Pulitzer-winning, full-blown self-portrait interlaced with shrewd political and social commentary.

His writing reflected the gamut of contemporary culture and often explored willful masculinity clashing with established authority, portraits more often than not mirrored in the pugnacious and high-living writer’s real-life exploits. A drinker, fighter, and unabashed pot smoker, Norman divorced five wives and nearly stabbed one to death. At the height of the women’s movement, he gained the scorn of feminists for, amongst other affronts during a reading at a YWCA, characterizing women as “low, sloppy beasts” whose sole substance was to bear children. As a New York City mayoral candidate, his platform consisted of New York City becoming the 51st state, and he later urged a referendum for “black ghetto dwellers” to set up their own government. In 1968, the self-described “old club fighter” broke actor Lane Smith’s jaw with a right hook and bit Rip Torn’s ear in another scuffle. In 1981 his sponsored parole of Jack Henry Abbott, a convict with literary ambitions, turned tragic after Abbott killed a man six weeks after his release.

In the end though, his writing was what mattered most. When he died at 84 of acute renal failure, praise for his literary contributions came from every corner of the world. He was buried at Provincetown Town Cemetery in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From Route 6 turn left on Conwell Street and bear right onto Cemetery Road.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Turn right at the cemetery’s second paved drive, proceed over the little rise, and stop just before the maintenance shed. Norman’s stone is the chalk-white one with an angled face in the grass on your right.

MAY 5, 1818 – MARCH 14, 1883

Expelled from Germany, France, and Belgium for radicalism, renowned socialist thinker Karl Marx lived most of his adult life in “a long, sleepless night of exile” as a stateless and penniless London journalist in poor health. In a crusade of “merciless criticism of everything existing,” he published hundreds of articles and essays promoting revolutionary reformist ideas, but his reputation primarily rests with two works:
Das Kapital
(Capital) and
Manifest der kommunistischen Partei
(
Communist Manifesto
).

Marx’s central tenet is that the materialistic conception of history involves two basic notions: First, the economic system at any given time determines the prevailing ideas; and second, history is an ongoing process predetermined by economic institutions and evolving in regular stages of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Thesis corresponds to the precapitalist period when there were no classes or exploitation. Antithesis corresponds to the era of capitalism and labor exploitation. Synthesis, or communism, would be the final product under which capital would be owned in common and exploitation could not exist.

To Marx, then, capitalism is the last stage of historical development before communism, and the proletariat is the last historical class. The two are fated to be in conflict until the proletariat inevitably establishes a transitional order into communism, or a classless society. In Marxism, the complete collapse of industrial capitalism and its replacement by communism is inevitable.

Based on these ideas, Marx was a revolutionary who sought to effect social change and, indeed, his mission in life was to contribute, in his own peaceable and intellectual way, to the overthrow of capitalist society. His most famous treatises, his copious militant pamphlets, his work in underground organizations in Paris, Brussels, and London and, finally, crowning all, his founding of the International Working Men’s Association in 1864 stand as testimony to his purpose.

Though Marx’s analysis of capitalist economy and his theories of historical materialism, the class struggle, and surplus value have greatly contributed to an almost scientific understanding of social divisions, Marx’s influence during his life was not great. But after his death, his ideas and theories gained more prominence as Marxism was adopted by the labor movement.

Marx’s theories on the nature of the capitalist state and the road to power were of critical importance with respect to subsequent
historical epochs. During the twentieth century a radical incarnation of Marx’s doctrines became the core of Bolshevik theory and, under the mercilessly brutal hand of Vladimir Ilich Lenin, communist Russia was born. However, it should be made clear that the totalitarian, police-state style of Communist governments that led to the misery of millions in places like the Soviet Union and North Korea bears little resemblance to the social form that Karl Marx idealistically proposed.

In the last two decades of his life, Marx was tormented by a mounting succession of ailments. In January 1883 it became tremendously difficult for him to swallow after a tumor developed in his throat. Two months later, he died in his armchair at 64.