Balakian Reads at Historic Jack Kerouac House - The Armenian Mirror-Spectator mirrorspectator.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from mirrorspectator.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Written in Mexico 1952 but not published until 1959, Dr. Sax is Jack Kerouac’s most enigmatic novel. Incorporating themes from New England heroes Melville and Hawthorne, Kerouac revisits boyhood scenes in Lowell, Mass., in rich, hallucinogenic prose. The narrative’s unifying event is the Flood of 1936, when the Great Snake of the Merrimac River swelled to record levels and inundated the mills, homes, businesses and lives of the working-class city. Dr. Sax is an acquired taste, and Cat de Leon, who grew up years later in Lynn, not far from Lowell, acquired it early on. She explains why it’s as important a part of Kerouac’s ‘legend’ as Visions of Cody.