A mordant, wickedly subversive parable set in a mental ward, the novel chronicles the head-on collision between its hell-raising, life-affirming hero Randle Patrick McMurphy and the totalitarian rule of Big Nurse. McMurphy swaggers into the mental ward like a blast of fresh air and turns the place upside down, starting a gambling operation, smuggling in wine and women, and egging on the other patients to join him in open rebellion. But McMurphy's...

Fighting to forge an identity independent of her famous husband, Zelda Fitzgerald, committed to a Baltimore psychiatric hospital in 1932, finds a friend in nurse Anne Howard, who, drawn into the Fitzgeralds' tumultuous lives, questions who the true genius is.