Counterculture icon and best-selling author Ken Kesey said he was "too young to be a beatnik and too old to be a hippie”. It's All a Kind of Magic is the first biography of Kesey. It reveals a youthful life of brilliance and eccentricity that encompassed wrestling, writing, magic and ventriloquism, CIA-funded experiments with hallucinatory drugs, and a notable cast of characters that would come to include Larry McMurtry, Tom Wolfe, Timothy Leary, the Grateful Dead, and Hunter S. Thompson.