One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

First edition of Ken Kesey’s classic first novel, one of the defining works of postwar American fiction, basis for the Academy Award-winning film starring Jack Nicholson. Octavo, original cloth. Boldly signed by Ken Kesey in the vivid multicolored inks that echo the book’s cover on the front free endpaper, and boldly signed beneath by Jack Nicholson, the star of its legendary film adaptation. Kirk Douglas, who purchased the stage and film rights, starred in the celebrated 1963 Broadway adaptation alongside Gene Wilder as Billy Bibbit, but the much-anticipated film adaptation took thirteen further years to reach the screen, finally arriving in 1975 as a production directed by the Czech filmmaker Miloš Forman and co-produced by Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz, with a screenplay by Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman that shifted the narrative perspective from Chief Bromden to McMurphy. The role of McMurphy was first offered to Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman before Jack Nicholson, fresh from his celebrated performances in Easy Rider and Chinatown, was cast in the part that would define his career. John Joseph Nicholson is widely regarded as one of the greatest screen actors in the history of cinema, a three-time Academy Award winner whose combination of magnetic physical presence, volcanic comic energy, and extraordinary psychological range has produced a body of work across more than six decades that few of his contemporaries have matched. His portrayal of McMurphy is universally considered the supreme performance of his career, drawing from Variety the assessment that Nicholson illuminates the dark recesses of the material with the kind of tough, resilient, multi-layered performance that made Five Easy Pieces and The Last Detail so memorable, and from the Hollywood Reporter the judgment that he draws a frighteningly persuasive portrait of a preeminently sane man being pushed to the outer limits of his sanity by the need to conform. The film swept the Academy Awards at the 48th ceremony, becoming only the second film in history to win all five major awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Nicholson, Best Actress for Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched, and Best Adapted Screenplay, the first film to accomplish this since It Happened One Night in 1934. It also earned six Golden Globe Awards including Best Drama and six BAFTA Awards including Best Film, and was selected in 1993 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant. Fine in a very good dust jacket. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. An extraordinary double-signed association copy of one of the most beloved of all American novels.