[Doctor Sax] was Kerouac's favourite book: it's easy to see why. It was much abused by the critics: it's easy to see why. Now, twenty years after its appearance in the United States, and a generation after it was written, a canonical book, this hash-brown study of the demons and angels of adolescence achieves hardback publication in Britain. For Kerouac Doctor Sax was a myth of puberty, the second chapter after Dreams of Gerard in the vast envisaged "Legend of Duluoz", the mythification of the author's life….

A literary nomad needs an origin and a promised land. Kerouac was multiply exiled: pelagic in the city the smalltown boy from Lowell, Massachusetts, where he was one of the Francophone expatriate community from Quebec, land of exiles (as it seemed then) looking back to a lost Brittany, land of miracles. It is a good pedigree for nostalgia.

Ti-Jean Kerouac's childhood...