Doctor Sax

From the most famous of the Beat writers, the semi-autobiographical novel of growing up between dreams and nightmares in early twentieth century Massachusetts, now reissued following Kerouac’s centenary celebration A haunting novel of deeply felt adolescence, Dr. Sax is the story of Jack Duluoz, a French-Canadian boy growing up in Kerouac’s own birthplace, the dingy factory town of Lowell, Massachusetts. There, Dr. Sax, with his flowing cape, slouched hat, and insinuating leer, is chief among the many ghosts and demons that populate Jack’s fantasy world. Deftly mingling memory and dream, Kerouac captures the accents and textures of his boyhood in Lowell in this novel of a cryptic, apocalyptic hipster phantom that he once described as “the greatest book I ever wrote, or that I will write.”