Doctor Sax

By: Jack Kerouac

Narrated by: Andrew Eiden

Doctor 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, Doctor 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, in a novel that he once described as “the greatest book I ever wrote, or that I will write.”

©1959 Jack Kerouac (P)2024 Blackstone Publishing

Critic reviews

“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)

“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)

“Vivid, moving, and funny.”

(The Guardian (London))

“Kerouac’s peculiar genius infects every page.”

(New York Times)

A poetry prose story

Had never read this title by Kerouac and a trip to city lights bookstore in SF and seeing this title on the shelf inspired me to do so. It’s some of his finest poetry, though barely followable as a story, with beautiful vignettes of his childhood but is interwoven with hallucination and fantasy. It goes a bit off the rails in the end and all the French was a bit daunting for me (and the reader of the audiobook) but in all a worthwhile read.

The narrator knows rhythm.

He did an excellent job and reads it like music. Hope he is the one who records Mexico City Blues.

aLove craftian tale told in kerouacs jazz prose style.

an interesting veiw of jacks memories of Lowell from child hood. a fine example of word jazz.