Doctor Sax

Doctor Sax
AuthorJack Kerouac
Cover artistRoy Kuhlman
LanguageEnglish
PublisherGrove Press
Publication date
1959
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint (Hardback & Paperback)
PagesApprox. 245 pages
ISBN0-8021-3049-6
OCLC16833360
813/.54 19
LC ClassPS3521.E735 D63 1987
Preceded byThe Dharma Bums
(1958) 
Followed byMaggie Cassidy
(1959) 

Doctor Sax (Doctor Sax: Faust Part Three) is a novel by Jack Kerouac published in 1959. Kerouac wrote it in 1952 while living with William S. Burroughs in Mexico City.

The novel was written quickly in the improvisatory style Kerouac called “spontaneous prose.”[1] In a letter to Allen Ginsberg dated May 18, 1952, Kerouac wrote, “I’ll simply blow [improvise like a jazz musician] on the vision of the Shadow in my 13th and 14th years on Sarah Ave. Lowell, culminated by the myth itself as I dreamt it in Fall 1948 . . . angles of my hoop-rolling boyhood as seen from the shroud.”[2] In a letter to Ginsberg dated November 8 of the same year, Kerouac admits “Doctor Sax was written high on tea [marijuana] without pausing to think, sometimes Bill [Burroughs] would come in the room and so the chapter ended there, . . .” (ibid, p. 185).

  1. ^ “The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”
  2. ^ Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, ed. Bill Morgan and David Stanford (NY: Viking, 2010), p. 173.