Doctor Sax

Book excerpt: “Kerouac’s best book.”—TIME Dr. Sax is a haunting novel of deeply felt adolescence, Jack Kerouac tells 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.”