Happy birthday, Upton Sinclair

It is the birthday of writer Upton Sinclair (1878), who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943 for his novel Dragon's Teeth (1942), about the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s. Sinclair is also remembered for his novel The Jungle (1906), in which he exposed the dangerous practices of the meatpacking industry after working undercover. Sinclair also took American journalism to task in The Brass Check (1919), a scathing critique of the Associated Press and the yellow journalism newspapers of William Randolph Hearst and others.

Happy birthday, writer William Golding

It is the birthday of English writer William Golding (1911), who is best remembered for his widely heralded novel Lord of the Flies (1954), the story of a group of British boys marooned on an uninhabited island. Golding won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. He also won the British Man Booker Prize in literature for Rites of Passage (1980), the first of his To the Ends of the Earth sea trilogy about a troubled British warship.

Happy birthday, Samuel Johnson

It is the birthday of Samuel Johnson (1709), who may be best remembered for compiling A Dictionary of the English Language (1855). It is considered among the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language, and remained the leading British dictionary for 150 years. It took him nine years to complete and brought him widespread recognition. Johnson was a prolific writer, composing poetry, essays, literary criticism, and biographies. Nevertheless, his enduring legacy is the dictionary.

What was Kesey's group of friends called?

It is the birthday of Ken Kesey (1935), who is remembered for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), a drama set in a mental institution. It received great acclaim, and was adapted as a movie. When he had to travel from California to New York for the publication of his second book, Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), Kesey's friend, Beat writer Neal Cassidy, arranged for a cross-country trip on a psychedelic-painted school bus. Do you remember the name of the group of hangers-on who went on the trip? Who wrote a 1968 book chronicling the events of the trip, and what was the name of the book? Enter your answers below.