男主角Randle Patrick McMurphy是名越獄的逃犯，卻莫名其妙被送進精神病院，他發現裡面許多不合理的制度，由於他一直鼓勵院中病患要活出自我，因而成為眾病人的領袖。他曾多次企圖逃亡，最後失敗被院方強制進行腦部手術，成為一個精神分裂者。最後一個平常受到他許多幫忙的院友，雖看似痴呆卻完成了McMurphy想逃出杜鵑窩的心願，他了結了McMurphy的生命，而自己也逃出了這不人道的瘋人院。本書曾被改編為電影「飛越杜鵑窩」，由傑克尼克遜主演。
　　In the early 1960s, fresh out of Stanford's creative writing program, Ken Kesey supported himself by working as an attendant at a psychiatric hospital. It was there that he wrote what became his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which Viking released on February 1, 1962. This hardcover edition, which includes new introductions and more than twenty-five line drawings that Kesey made while composing the novel, commemorates the fortieth anniversary of the publication of this American classic." Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, this is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the awesome power of the Combine. Hailed upon its publication as "a glittering parable of good and evil" (The New York Times Book Review) and "a roar of protest against middlebrow society's Rules and the invisible Rulers who enforce them" (Time), this powerful book is as bracing and insightful today as it was in the 1960s.