Doctor Sax

by Jack Kerouac

Overview

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.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802162113
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	08/15/2023
Series:	Kerouac, Jack
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	210,000
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

JACK KEROUAC was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922. On the Road, published in 1957, epitomized what became known as the “Beat generation.” He died in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1969.

What People are Saying About This

John Clellon Holmes

Kerouac's work is one of the most extraordinary, influential, maddening, and ultimately prodigious achievements in recent literature.

Allen Ginsberg

Jack Kerouac, new Buddha of American prose, who spit forth intelligence...a spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Dr. Sax

“Kerouac’s best book.”—TIME

“Spooky and tender with stretches of sheer phosphorescent fantasy, Dr. Sax has a vigor and a thirst for life . . . One of the gems of modern literature.”—Rolling Stone

“Kerouac’s peculiar genius infects every page.”—New York Times

“Outlandish and visionary, it remains a powerful evocation of the exuberant iconoclasm of the Beat Generation.”—The Guardian

From the Publisher

Kerouac's peculiar genius infects every page.

New York Times Book Review

Duluoz is exuberantly profane and comfortably delinquent…Full of pinball prose, Doctor Sax is an elegy to the warm, safe smells of a tenement kitchen and the dark mysteries of a city neighborhood. It is Kerouac’s best book.”

Time

Kerouac dreams of America in the authentic rolling rhythms of a Whitman or a Thomas Wolfe, drunk with eagerness for life.”

New York Herald Tribune

Vivid, moving, and funny.”

The Guardian (London)

Spooky and tender with stretches of sheer phosphorescent fantasy, Doctor Sax has a vigor and thirst for life. A real prize, one of the lost gems of modern literature.”

Rolling Stone

Kerouac’s peculiar genius infects every page.”

New York Times