Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Wallace Stegner got along with most of his creative writing students at Stanford University - but Ken Kesey wasn't one of them, and the two ended up hating each other. In "Wallace Stegner and the American West," out next month from Knopf, Philip Fradkin reveals that boozing, drug-using Kesey, who later penned "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," considered strait-laced Stegner a "fairly talented illiterate" who was "not writing to people any longer, not people he knows and loves, any way. He's writing to a classroom and his colleagues . . . [His] academic life has come to the end of its usefulness." The insults so in-furiated Stegner, author of "Angle of Repose," he banned Kesey from his office and called him "crazy as a coot, and dangerous." Years later, Kesey blamed the tensions on the generation gap, explaining, "We were on different sides of the fence. As I took LSD and he drank Jack Daniel's, we drew the line between us right there." Still, Stegner taught other notables with out incident, like Thomas McGuane and Larry McMurtry.
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