Harper Perennial Modern Classics – Doctor Sax - Softcover

Kerouac, Jack

3.4

3,365 ratings by Goodreads

9780007204991: Harper Perennial Modern Classics – Doctor Sax

Softcover

ISBN 10: 000720499X ISBN 13: 9780007204991

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2006

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Beautifully rejacketed, Doctor Sax is one of Kerouac’s best books – a vivid, nostalgic tale of one boy’s extraordinary childhood.

Of all his books, Doctor Sax was the one Jack Kerouac loved the most. He began writing it in 1948, but wrote the greater part of it in 1952, when he was staying in Mexico with William Burroughs.

Told through the character of Kerouac’s fictional alter ego, Jack Duluoz, the novel tells the story of his extraordinary childhood in Massachusetts. A clever and rebellious boy, playing among the river weeds and railroad tracks, going to the movies, reading pulp comics and watching cartoons, Jack creates an imaginary world of strange, new possibilities. Within this world lies the weird and wonderful Doctor Sax...

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Review:

‘Spooky and tender with stretches of sheer phosphorescent fantasy, Doctor Sax has a vigour and thirst for life. A real prize, one of the lost gems of modern literature.’ Rolling Stone

‘Duluoz is exuberantly profane and comfortably delinquent, and like any right-thinking twelve year old, he is a track addict. On cold winter mornings, he scribbles out racing forms and stages elaborate handicap races with marbles. 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 neighbourhood. It is Kerouac’s best book.’ Time

‘Vivid, moving and funny’ Guardian

About the Author:

Jack Kerouac was born in 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, the youngest of three children in a French-Canadian family. Having left college, he joined the merchant marines and began the restless wanderings that were to continue for the greater part of his life. His first novel, The Town and the City, was published in 1950. On the Road, although written in 1951 (in a few hectic days on a scroll of newsprint), was not published until 1957 – it made him one of the most controversial and best-known writers of his time. Publication of his many other books, among them The Subterraneans, Doctor Sax and Desolation Angels, followed. Jack Kerouac died in St. Petersburg, Florida at the age of forty-seven.

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