Kerouac, Jack

An important association between two key Beat figures, Lucien Carr was one of the most important influences on Kerouac’s life and one of his closest friends. The two met at the West End Bar across from Columbia campus in 1944 — Kerouac was 22 and Carr 19 — and it was Carr who introduced Kerouac to both Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs later that same year. The stories of the group’s early exploits, including Carr’s manslaughter trial and brief imprisonment, have become part of the Beat Generation saga.

Doctor Sax is an evocative novel of childhood: combining a realistic narrative of small town America (Lowell, Massachusetts) from a boy’s point of view with a child’s flights of imagination, nourished by The Shadow Magazine and movies like Trader Horn. The book was completed in Mexico City in June 1952 “while I sat on Bill Burroughs’ toilet bowl. I had no other place to write. So I wrote on my lap in pencil. He had millions of junkies coming in, and women and guests. I didn’t have a cent when I wrote that. Burroughs was supporting me” (Kerouac to Charters). There were also 26 lettered copies signed by Kerouac in this deluxe issue of the novel.