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  • Published: 25 July 2012
  • ISBN: 9780141972022
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 224

Doctor Sax




Kerouac's autobiographical account of his Beat years, new to Penguin Modern Classics

Jack Kerouac called Doctor Sax, the enigmatic figure who haunted his boyhood imagination, 'my ghost, personal angel, private shadow, secret lover'. In this extraordinary autobiographical account of growing up in Lowell, Massachussetts, told through his fictional alter ego Jack Duluoz, he mingles real people and events with fantastical figures to capture the accents, scents, sights and texture of his childhood: playing among the river weeds and railroad tracks, going to church, witnessing life and death on the street corners. Written when he was staying with William Burroughs in Mexico in 1952, Doctor Sax was Kerouac's favourite of all his books: a dark, vivid and magical evocation of a boy's vibrant inner life.

  • Published: 25 July 2012
  • ISBN: 9780141972022
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 224

About the author

Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922. In 1947, enthused by bebop, the rebel attitude of his friend Neal Cassidy, and the throng of hobos, drug addicts and hustlers he encountered in New York, he decided to discover America and hitchhhike across the country. His writing was openly autobiographical and he developed a style he referred to as 'spontaneous prose' which he used to record the experiences of the Beat Generation. Among his many novels are On the Road, Maggie Cassidy, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums and Big Sur. He died in 1969.

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Praise for Doctor Sax

Kerouac's best book

Time

Spooky and tender with stretches of sheer phosphorescent fantasy, Doctor Sax has a vigour and a thirst for life ... one of the gems of modern literature

Rolling Stone