Commonwealth native Ed McClanahan won critical acclaim in 1983 with the publication of The Natural Man, a novel about coming of age in Needmore, Kentucky. In 1962, McClanahan's teaching career took him to Stanford University where he studied writing with fellow Kentuckians Wendell Berry and James Baker Hall, as well as Ken Kesey, the author of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest." McClanahan drew the nickname "Captain Kentucky" and still writes of himself as "an unreconstructed hippie."