In this haunting novel of intensely felt adolescence Jack Kerouac tells the story of Jack Duluoz a French-Canadian boy growing up as Kerouac himself did in the dingy factory town of Lowell Massachusetts. Dr. Sax with his flowing cape slouch 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 texture of his boyhood in Lowell as he relates Jack s adventures with this cryptic apocalyptic hipster phantom.